Ian Mulvany

April 10, 2021

Innovation focus, and target states

#innovation #design #pace

I liked reading this thread this morning. It’s about the difference between setting future state of a project as something new, vs describing it as a movement towards a better now, if you will. The response from Andy is good.

https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1380717439760048131

I have a thought and a comment. 

Thought: we always need to be setting some future state. Lean is about creating the environment for the iterated improvement, but without a measure against reality we can never tell whether the changes we are making are improving things or just changing them. I’m working with a couple of product teams at the moment. With one there is a clear line of sight between what the changes are trying to do and his that effects improved outcomes for the customer. With the other we have a harder time seeing in to what the customer is doing, and so deterring that feedback loop is also harder. Sometimes these are fairly hard problems to get on top of. 

What of the correct time frame to be setting these changes? I think that’s a strategic decision and will depend on too many factors to be put into a formula. 

Comment: years ago I worked with a key design agency to help us shape the future vision of some journal. They did the big consultancy thing and created a completing future vision, but the entire workflow for publishing articles was passed over as an issue to be improved as a default first step, whereas in reality it is exactly this workflow that is the experience and that requires much of our attention. That future vision, mostly irrelevant. Those small details that were worth just a footnote in the deck, those are actually the game. 

About Ian Mulvany

Hi, I'm Ian - I work on academic publishing systems. You can find out more about me at mulvany.net. I'm always interested in engaging with folk on these topics, if you have made your way here don't hesitate to reach out if there is anything you want to share, discuss, or ask for help with!