George Glackin - Value Flows and Design Criteria Maps

I cut my teeth in this at Procter and Gamble and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where I created a startup incubator, and I think one of the lessons that hits me over the head every time is that it takes the same amount of time, energy, energy, , blood, sweat, and tears to work on a small problem as it takes to work on a big and audacious problem.

By the same token, it takes the same amount of time and energy to work on an okay solution as it takes to work on a delightful and obvious solution. That hit me in the head, and I was looking for a way to be a little bit more intentional with the people I work with, whether it's a corporate explorer, whether it's a founder, and I, I will relentlessly and sometimes people tell me, annoyingly say. Is it a hair on fire problem we're working on?

Are we trying to develop a delightful and obvious solution? So it was that it was out of that need to be a little bit more intentional that these tools sprang to life. And I think looking at my experience in the corporate world and watching, many, many founders pitching me. It's very difficult for the individual to capture that energy and emotion of this out of the box solution that I've talked about.

So, if used well, these tools have proven pretty effective, and I finally coined the term, value flows and design criteria maps. And that's what we're going to talk about in this chapter. Aidan McCullen (2): before we get into the tools. I thought about the, such an important aspect that happens to many, many corporate explorers, particularly if they've been a long time in a certain industry or inside a certain company, and that's the curse of expertise.

And there's a quote I love by the painter.

He said there's nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose because before he can do so he has to first forget all the roses that he had ever painted before and i love how that quote encapsulates the mental traps of expertise and previous experience and you highlighted in the chapter that corporate explorers should start work on the value proposition with skepticism about their own experience i thought we'd share that first before we get into the toolkits

Yeah, it's interesting, I was just working with a founder last week, and I said, you have the curse of knowledge. You're literally the fish that's swimming in the fishbowl and does not know you're in the water. Yeah. And I think being more intentional about actually having to watch, I use the example of a six year old girl tying her shoes because it's such a simple example.

We've all tried, we've all learned to tie our shoes, hopefully, and it's You know, if you tied your shoes this morning, do you even remember doing the steps? So I think being a little bit more intentional about laying out those steps, that's the insight behind the value flow. And then we get into such a routine. I think as we get used to technology it becomes so commonplace. We forget the wow factor that we saw the first time. We only think about, well, did I get it done or not?

And we forget that power of emotion. Aidan McCullen (2): perfect segway as you mentioned there the girl tying shoes and what could have helped her get around that problem. So i'm gonna show on the screen for those people watching us the value flow ofputting on shoes the easy place to start is the, is where the value flow, because it gets us grounded in seeing it through the eyes of the consumer.

And , the simple objective of this, , the six year old girl wants to go from being barefoot to having a securely fastened shoe on her foot. And, you, first time you tried to do anything, the fingers fumble with this. And parents are watching this and they're saying, Oh my goodness, it's taking so much time. And the girl's getting frustrated. So the, the inventor behind this one saw that and said, well, there must be a better way. And Velcro exists. And the insight now seems so obvious.

You just, just pull the Velcro around and it takes less time and effort for the girl to do this. The magic behind this also comes with the design criteria map because There's more to it than just the function, Just to unpack this tool, the first thing to notice is that the scale on the left hand side does not go from poor to excellent. It goes from not good enough, good enough, delightful, and overshot. And this captures the insight that it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

And I would tell you from my laundry care experience. It's possible that Procter and Gamble was guilty of going from clean to cleaner to so ridiculously clean that we can measure it technology wise, but nobody cares. And the notion of overshot comes into this, and we'll refer to that in these examples. So that's the left hand scale. Going across the side, you've heard me talk about capturing this magical, emotional moment.

Well, most of the time, a designer will gravitate to the functional criteria and forget about Well, wait a minute, there's emotional and social criteria running through this as well. So that's, that's the matrix we're working with. Not good enough to overshot and functional, emotional and social. And so now back to our six year old girl. It's true. Velcro allows her to get the shoe on with less effort and fasten it more securely. But what else is going on here?

The framework captures not just the functional, but the emotional and the social benefits. And what's wonderful about this example, is yes, , The little girl got her shoe on more quickly and more securely, but she gets to feel like a big girl. So there's the first emotional benefit and the parents get to feel like they're great parents. And they have the emotional comfort that their daughter is now developing normally. She's achieved this important, developmental milestone.

Everybody's feeling good about themselves and this tool allows us to capture that magic. Aidan McCullen (2): It's such a difficult thing to capture through a questionnaire or asking questions because it's emotional so you can't measure that even an fmri scanner can't articulate it for That's true. That's true. Well, I think that the power of having a framework like this is it's not just a tool to capture, it's a tool to promote critical thinking in a different way.

And so if I give a corporate explorer or a founder this tool, they've got an empty space staring at them that they have to think about and they have to fill in. Aidan McCullen (2): i'm gonna share as well george website where people can find you to reach out about these tools. But also if you go to the corporate explorer website so www. thecorporateexplorer. com forward slash contact.

You can complete a contact form and request a version of both chapter 5 which also george co authored and chapter 10 because there's a corrected version of the diagram from the book. That we just showed on screen here. So go to www. thecorporateexplorer. com forward slash contact to request a copy of that, and the team will share that with you, but George, you mentioned that you have experience working with P&G.

One of the great tools that P&G created to, satisfy so many emotional needs for, for the customer was the P&G Swiffer wet jet. Obviously it's a more complex story than the the six year old girl tying her shoes, but hopefully we've got a handle on the tools so that we can dive into that more completely. So this story comes from back in 1994, and there was a corporate explorer who was watching his family mop the floors. And he was a pretty curious guy.

You could say he was a, an anthropologist in his own home, and , he watched this and he had been challenged to come up with the next billion dollar business. And he's looking at this one going, this might be the one and took these tools that we've just talked about to the team and said, okay, let's all go be anthropologists. Let's go into the homes of a dozen families and just watch them do this process of mopping the floor.

And the value flow that's in the book was even more dramatic than the shoes. It shows that many steps went down to few from a functional level, including the amount of time that it took. To clean the mop the amount of time it took to clean the person because the person very typically got dirty and there was another very intriguing insight that most of the consumers were sweeping the floor to get the crumbs up before they mopped the floor. So, this is classic fish in its own water.

All these steps are going on and people who are supposed to be experts in this space. We're not picking up on it. So the discipline of going through a value flow really laid this out. So now the team using the value flow technique, they're grounded in the reality of the problem and they can switch their thinking over to, okay, let's think about this as we're designing the solution from both the functional, emotional and social standpoint.

And because it was a diverse team, it was an incredibly diverse team. It was one of the most diverse Proctor ever put against this. It had the usual suspects, of engineers as part of this and people who are going to turn it into a production ready product. It also had some people we just would not expect to see in the room. At the time, it was unusual to have industrial designers as part of the team.

So we have this immensely diverse team from a skillset standpoint, and we brought in people from different divisions within the company. So we had a diaper division was using non woven substrates. Obviously we have a hard surface cleaning division. We didn't quite have a device division. But that, that was spurred when this came in.

So you have different skill sets in the room, you have different functional divisions in the room, and we have this functional, emotional, and social imperative to think about. Great. We're set up for success now. And , what we found in going through this is yes, fewer steps. Didn't have to sweep, didn't have to clean my own clothes, did not have to clean the mop. The really powerful insight that I believe made the franchise is that consumers played back. You won't believe this.

I got the whole family involved with cleaning the floors because it was so fun and easy. So that, that may have made the franchise right there. And I think in this specific example, homeowners want their guests to come into a house that's always guest ready and a bucket and mop. Can you imagine? We've got guests coming over in 15 minutes. Good heavens. There's just no way to do this, but you take out a wet jet and you push it around the floor. And in five minutes, your home is guest ready.

So I think. Yes, functional imperatives were delivered on, but the franchise got made based on emotional benefits. Such a great story and the framework i mean i started applying it to stuff i'm doing on a on a day basis and can i go where am i missing or where am i, leaving in steps for even the listener for the show that i shouldn't be and that's a question to listeners of the stuff i'm doing that is annoying for you please reach out and let me know cuz.

You become blind to this stuff because you develop this expertise, develop a way of doing things. And it's very, very difficult to rewire your thinking.

But I had a final question for you, George, which is more for corporate explorers who deal with the silo mentality , because you mentioned there about how that team in P&G was very diverse, but I'm pretty sure like would happened in most of those very first meetings that comes along, everybody's sizing each other up looking at us and them across the organization, because that's the way organizations were developed, particularly successful

organizations, but that breaking down of silos is something that's so, so. Key to successful product development including bring in the customer in like these anthropologist going in some cases going living with the customer i love you to share some ways that that can be broken down in organizations and the value of breaking down silos. The value of breaking out the silos just cannot be understated.

It's really a one plus one equals three moment in most cases, because people just look at the world differently because they've been trained to look at the world differently. And I thought I was a pretty good product developer. A new business developer before I have these insights, but it's amazing, even after decades of practice, what I would miss that someone else just with a different lens. I use the term alien eyes a lot.

You bring somebody into the room who doesn't have this curse of knowledge and they just look at things and go, like, I can't believe you missed that, George. And it's it's not a bad moment, it's a wonderful moment, it's very empowering for everybody. . There was a project that Andy Benz and I did for a client where the engineers were convinced they had no right to be in the room with the end user. They said, that's somebody else's job, and it may even not be somebody in the company's job.

It may be someone we have to hire from the outside. And to put a tool in someone's hand and say, you can do this. You can take, you can just create a log when you go and watch someone doing the task, you can do this is amazingly empowering. And, now you've got an engineer is acting like industrial designers and industrial designers, acting like engineers, and it's just, it's a phenomenal experience for the entire team. It's very, very empowering.

One last thing I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this. So we've been talking about the, sort of the insight phase of a, of a new project and then the development phase of a new project. There has to be the validation and scale phase or it never gets to market. And I think one of the things that's very difficult when you bring in , the downstream players, let's say you bring in an advertising agency. Their first instinct might be to say, well, these guys haven't looked at it.

Like we would, we need to reinvent the wheel or, or even worse. They're not familiar enough with the space. They think they are and they create nonsense. Hypothetical situation, of course. And I think that when we've done this particular, the design criteria map, all of the success criteria have been laid out for design, for development, for manufacturer, for marketing, for sales, all the talking points, if you take it all the way downstream for a sales script have been laid out.

So it's a powerful tool in terms of the scale and validation of this. It supports test marketing. It supports selling experiments. I've been pleasantly surprised at the power of having a, an artifact that captures the original thinking of the inventor and the designer, how, how powerful that is flowing downstream.

Aidan McCullen (2): it's powerful to have a new lens through which to look at things and you mentioned about the, neurodiversity or the different elements of a team coming together looking at the same thing from their different perspectives but also having a different lens which is your toolkits as well as so so powerful. George for people who want to reach out to you, maybe they have a project or

new product they're trying to develop . Where's the best place to find you?, probably the most simple way is I'm on LinkedIn. That's an easy way to find me. And of course you mentioned the ChangeLogic portal. That's a way too. Aidan McCullen (2): Absolutely. I'll link to that as well. And last but not least, I want to thank our sponsor Wazoku. Many people emailed in to ask what does the name Wazoku mean Wazoku is Swahili. And it just means great idea.

And the Wazoku team are advocates of everyday and total innovation inside organizations and strives to make innovation a part of everyone's role. Just like George said in every organization. Recently, Wazoku acquired Innocentive, Change in Columbia, Mindpool, IdeaDrop. And most recently poster lab, and you can find Wazoku at Wazoku. com. Finally, thank you to our guest today. Co author of the corporate explorer field book, George Glackin. Thank you for joining us. Excellent. It's great.

Thank you very much.