Named after the brilliant Clay Shirky his principle broadly states that:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Sometimes this may manifest itself as blindness towards new or different ways of doing things, other times it’s the challenge of and innate resistance to making oneself obsolete. Examples include there being more money in life-long illnesses than cures, traditional newspapers’ resistance to alternative online news forms, planned obsolescence of products, committees requiring the presence of committees, or resistance to self-checkouts at a supermarket.

Some exceptions include Vitality health insurance in the UK that  rewards a healthy lifestyle, and the lightbulb industry, in its move towards ultra long-lasting and efficient LED lights, boldly eliminating the need to replace most of its products for a lifetime. I’m still waiting for a breakdown service to reward people for taking care of their cars rather than focusing on fixing the breakdowns.

The Shirky Principle

I love this diagram by Henrik Kniberg for how to think about what to release to your customers when. Hopefully it’s self-explanatory, but the idea is that a standard approach of having your grand plan of what you think people want at the start and then working on each bit at a time until finally, after months of work, you have something that works is not, when explained like that, so smart. Each piece, in the car example, doesn’t help the customer at all until it’s all put together.

Instead, you can focus on providing the next piece of functionality that helps someone get their job done a little better than before. At the beginning they’ll probably have to put up with a lot if they want to use it, but with each successive release they find they can get their job done a little better than before and get value out of what you’re building. A side-effect is the feedback you get along the way will likely help you learn and build something that is better than what you had in mind at the beginning and all along the way the customer had some value instead of waiting for months.

Providing usable functionality at every step is not always easy, and it usually involves some rework as you move from one step to the other. But it’s generally a price worth paying to give your customers value sooner and start learning as soon as you can.

HT: the brilliant User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton and Kevin Alves

A release strategy for happier customers, sooner

This is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. I like it because it tries to make sense out of the range of emotions we have by relating his 8 primary emotions to related ones where two primary emotions meet. For example, remorse is like feeling both disgust and sadness, awe is surprise and fear. At opposite sides of the wheel are opposite emotions eg Joy >< Sadness. Other versions of his framework go 3D and map the intensity of emotions as well, for example, rage > anger > annoyance, or ecstasy > joy > serenity. Neat.

Mapping emotions.

Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s behavioural economics theory modeling how we make decisions. It illustrates, among other things, some of the non-rational decisions we make as we are guided by emotion and heuristics in decisions. The sketch points out a few of the key points:

Loss aversion - the different shape of the curves as we make gains or losses (either side of the centre) represents how a loss of £100 annoys us much more than a gain of £100 gives us pleasure.

Diminishing sensitivity - the levelling off of the curves represents that we’ll enjoy winning £100, if we only have £100, much more than we’d enjoy winning £100 if we had £900.

Adaptation level - We don’t evaluate from some absolute level - we evaluate whether something is good or bad from a neutral reference point that we adapt to. So, by the end of a movie the movie theatre doesn’t feel dark, yet walking out feels blinding. Your reaction to the £100 example above was probably affected by whether you think £100 is a lot of money or a little, which is all to do with your adaptation level.

Prospect theory

I love Bill Buxton’s Long Nose of Innovation theory that basically a ton of small incremental work precedes what feels like a wow innovation moment. Computer mice, touchscreens, robotics, CNC machining, haptics etc were all around for decades before they hit the big time.

Sketchplanations tagged with theory