- Our CADaptive example highlights several
of the benefits of our second principle,
drive continuous engagement.
Emphasize deep collaboration, transparent work flows,
and flat teams to gain efficiency, continuity,
and capability across all contributors.
Cumulatively this enables the founder's mindset
of co-ownership and emphasis on impact.
When design is a black box to those relying
on its outcomes, they're not in control of their destiny.
They need to understand how design happens,
just as they need to understand how the technology
in their product works.
It's critical to take ownership
of a venture's creative capital.
For this, we need to get engaged.
And relying on a few theatrical presentations,
and the occasional status update along the way,
simply doesn't provide enough contact.
What's more, the type of contact this does provide,
with attendees divided into presenters and an audience,
doesn't foster the type
of all-hands-on-deck collaboration needed.
That said, presentations are, as I am demonstrating
right now, a necessary evil.
And they do offer some value.
First, creatives are pressure-prompted
and presentations and their deadlines spur us into action.
Case in point, I've been working on this course
for months, but the heavy lifting really happened
in just the past few weeks and maybe days.
Second, they offer us an opportunity to step back,
take a broader view, get organized, and get clear
on our work and communications.
As a result of these two, presentations literally get
everyone on the same page.
This alignment facilitates informed debate
and decision making.
Now, on the other hand, presentations can be
a massive time suck.
It's hard to know when to stop, so people spend
a ton of time, often over-documenting along the way.
This means that we're often unnecessarily
polishing artifacts, refining interim work
that won't actually contribute to the final product.
And sometimes we do this just to show
how much we've been doing, for acknowledgement,
or justification of our contribution.
Ultimately, presentations are far too high-burden
and low-frequency to serve as our primary line
of communication in a fast-paced venture.
We can serve the limited resources we have
in a new venture by having a bias for action
and rapid good enough decision making,
not by pushing interim work to
an unnecessarily high level of fidelity.
Let's look at a typical design process
to see the effect of presentations on their progress.
In broad strokes, the development process is meant
to move us from a need to a product or service
that addresses that need.
Everyone has different terminology,
but the typical phases along the way include
a discovery phase that carries us from a need
through analysis to insights.
Next is a design phase, where we translate insights
into concepts.
And finally, a delivery phase, where concepts are resolved
into products, services, experiences and so on.
Of course, the process is much messier
and far more iterative than this,
but you get the idea.
Our goal is to take the most efficient route
from need to delivered result.
A straight line of progress.
What actually happens is that we get
a little way in and then stop.
We all need to get aligned, bring in key stakeholders
and collaborate, so we pause and build a presentation.
There's prep and response time associated with that,
so the review cycle can often take days,
perhaps even a week or more.
We then get back on our way again
and before long we need another alignment, collaboration,
or approval review cycle.
This happens again and again and again
throughout the work and the cost compounds.
We lose time to presentations that could otherwise be put
toward activities that more directly progress
the work and it's impact.
In an ideal world, we'd remain continuously engaged,
eliminating the need for the majority of the presentations
and more formal meetings, and reallocating that time
back to more productive work.
Continuous engagement can take many forms
and can be implemented with varying levels of commitment.
Our preferred approach is to colocate decision makers
and project teams to remain continually aligned.
Much as we did in the Pfizer example that I provided.
This alone enables more productive use of time
typically consumed by phase-gates,
interim presentations and check-ins.
Continuous engagement benefits the team, the work
and the eventual business outcomes of the venture.
It improves efficiency, by maximizing knowledge sharing
and capture from the team and stakeholders,
by greatly reducing the review cycles,
often taking the feedback loop down from days to hours.
And finally, by saving the majority of the time
normally required for presentation development and review,
enabling it to be reinvested
into the forward motion of the project.
It drives continuity through the work streams.
When continually engaged, the team's visibility
across all aspects of the venture,
not just what's happening in the smaller silo,
helps everyone to remain in sync and to understand
the interconnectedness of their efforts.
This awareness provides greater redundancy
in the event that the team shifts or scales.
And big hand-off moments can be reduced.
And the time associated with them can be reallocated.
It enables capability development through hands-on exposure
to key design skills, as well as, to key business strategy
and operations disciplines.
And this cycles us through the virtuous circle
I highlighted before.
Through design we launched on our start-ups
and through entrepreneurship we become better designers.
Finally, the understanding that comes
from this close collaboration aides with future decisions
on how to manage scaling, which capabilities need
to come in-house, which can remain external and so on.
Ultimately, continuous engagement encourages
a founder's mindset within the team,
including a deep, firsthand understanding
of the full functioning of the venture,
it's opportunities and challenges,
prioritization and decision making,
and the interrelationships throughout.
This imbues the team with a sense
of pride, commitment, ownership
and accountability.