Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Innovation’ Category

There are many flavors of innovation – incremental, disruptive, and seven flavors in between. And there is lots of argument about the level of innovation – mine’s radical and yours isn’t; that’s just improving what we already have; that’s too new – no one will ever buy it. We want to label the work in order to put it in the right bucket, to judge if we’re doing the right work. But the labels get in the way – they’re loaded with judgments, both purrs and snarls.

Truth is, innovation work falls on a continuum of newness and grouping them makes little sense. And, it’s not just newness that matters – it’s how the newness fits (or doesn’t) within the context of how things happen today and how customers think they should happen tomorrow. So what to do?

Customers notice the most meaningful innovations, and they notice the most meaningful ones before the less meaningful. Evaluate the time it takes a customer to notice the innovation and there may be hope to evaluate the importance of the innovation.

The technology reduces cost, and at the end of the month when the numbers are rolled up the accountants can see the improvement. This is real improvement, but there’s a significant lag and the people doing the work don’t see it as meaningful. This one’s a tough sell – buy this new thing, train on it, use it for three months, and if you keep good records and do some nifty statistics you’ll see an improvement.

The technology reduces scrap, and at the end of the week the scrap bin will be half full instead of fully full. Scrap is waste and waste reduction is real improvement. This is an easier sell – buy it and train on it and at the end of the week you’ll notice a reduction in scrap. This is important but only to those who are measured on scrap. And today the scrap is emptied every week, now we can empty it every other week. The time to notice is reduced, but the impact may not be there.

The technology increases throughput, and at the end of the shift the bins will be fuller than full. Here – try it for a shift and see what you think. If you like it, you can buy it. I’ll be back tomorrow with a quote. This is noticeable within eight hours. And at the end of eight hours there are more things that can be sold. That’s real money, and real money gets noticed.

The technology makes the product last two hours instead of one. Here – try it for a couple hours. I’ll go get a coffee and come back and see what you think. You won’t have to stop the machine nearly as often and you’ll put more parts into finished goods inventory. The technology gets noticed within two hours and the purchase order is signed in three.

Where the old technology was load, this is quiet. Don’t bother with ear protection, just give it a go. Pretty cool, isn’t it. Go get your boss and I’ll sell you a couple units right now. This one shows its benefits the end user right away – first try.

The most meaningful innovations get noticed instantly. Stop trying to label the innovation and simply measure how long it takes your customer to notice.

It’s pretty clear that innovation is the way to go. There’s endless creation of new technologies, new materials, and new processes so innovation can create new things to sell. And there are multiple toolsets and philosophies to get it done, but it’s difficult.

When doing new there’s no experience, no predictions, no certainty. But innovation is no dummy and has come up with a way to overcome the uncertainty. It builds knowledge of systems through testing – build it, test it, measure it, fix it. Not easy, but doable. And what makes it all possible is the repeatable response of things like steel, motors, pumps, software, hard drives. Push on them repeatably and their response is repeatable; stress them in a predictable way and their response is predictable; break them in a controlled way and the failure mode can be exercised.

Once there’s a coherent hypothesis that has the potential to make magic, innovation builds it in the lab, creates a measurement system to evaluate goodness, and tests it. After the good idea, innovation is about converting the idea into a hypothesis – a prediction of what will happen and why – and testing them early and often. And once they work every-day-all-day and make into production, the factory measures them relentlessly to make sure the goodness is shipped with every unit, and the data is religiously plotted with control charts.

The next evolution of innovation will come from systematically improving people systems. There are some roadblocks but they can be overcome. In reality, they already have been overcome it’s just that no one realizes it.

People systems are more difficult because their responses are not repeatable – where steel bends repeatably for a given stress, people do not. Give a last minute deliverable to someone in a good mood, and the work gets done; give that same deliverable to the same person on a bad day, and you get a lot of yelling. And because bad moods beget bad moods, people modify each other’s behavior. And when that non-repeatable, one-person-modifying-another response scales up to the team level, business unit, company, and supply chain, you have a complex adaptive system – a system that cannot be predicted. But just as innovation of airliners and automobiles uses testing to build knowledge out of uncertainty, testing can do the same for people systems.

To start, assumptions about how people systems would respond to new input must be hardened into formal hypotheses. And for the killer hypotheses that hang together, an experiment is defined; a small target population is identified; a measurement system created; a baseline measurement is taken; and the experiment is run. Data is then collected, statistical analyses are made, and it’s clear if the hypothesis is validated or not. If validated, the solution is rolled out and the people system is improved. And in a control chart sense, the measurement system is transferred to the whole system and is left to run continuously to make sure the goodness doesn’t go away. If it’s invalidated, another hypothesis is generated and the process is repeated. (It’s actually better to test multiple hypotheses in parallel.)

In the past, this approach was impossible because the measurement system did not exist. What was needed was a simple, mobile data acquisition system for “people data”, a method to automatically index the data, and a method to quickly process and display the results. The experimental methods were clear, but there was no response for the experiments. Now there is.

People systems are governed by what people think and feel, and the stories they tell are the surrogates for their thoughts and feelings. When an experiment is conducted on a people system, the stories are the “people data” that is collected, quantified, and analyzed. The stories are the response to the experiment.

It is now possible to run an experiment where a sample population uses a smart phone and an app to collect stories (text, voice, pictures), index them, and automatically send them to a server where some software groups the stories and displays them in a way to see patterns (groups of commonly indexed stories). All this is done in real time. And, by clicking on a data point, the program brings up the story associated with that data point.

Here’s how it works. The app is loaded, people tell their stories on their phone, and a baseline is established (a baseline story pattern). Inputs or constraints are changed for the target population and new stories are collected. If the patterns change in a desirable way (statistical analysis is possible), the new inputs and constraints are rolled out. If the stories change in an undesirable way, the target population reverts back to standard conditions and the next hypothesis is tested.

Unbiased, real time, continuous information streams to make sense of your people systems is now possible. Real time, direct connection to your employees and your customers is a reality, and the implications are staggering.

Thank you Dave Snowden.

From the outside it’s unclear how things happen; but from the inside it’s clear as day. No, it’s not your bulletproof processes; it’s not your top down strategy; and it’s not your operating plans. It’s your people.

At some level everything happens like this:

An idea comes to you that makes little sense, so you drop it. But it comes again, and then again. It visits regularly over the months and each time reveals a bit of its true self. But still, it’s incomplete. So you walk around with it and it eats at you; like a parasite, it gets stronger at your expense. Then, it matures and grows its voice – and it talks to you. It talks all the time; it won’t let you sleep; it pollutes you; it gets in the way; it colors you; and finally you become the human embodiment of the idea.

And then it tips you. With one last push, it creates enough discomfort to roll over the fear of acknowledging its existence, and you set up the meeting.

You call the band and let them know it’s time again to tour. You’ve been through it before and you all know deal. You know your instruments and you know how to harmonize. You know what they can do (because they’ve done it before) and you trust them. You sing them the song of your idea and they listen. Then you ask them to improvise and sing it back, and you listen. The mutual listening moves the idea forward, and you agree to take a run at it.

You ask how it should go. The lead vocalist tells you how it should be sung; the lead guitar works out the fingering; the drummer beats out the rhythm; and the keyboardist grins and says this will be fun. You all know the sheet music and you head back to your silos to make it happen.
In record time, the work gets done and you get back together to review the results. As a group you decide if the track is good enough play in public. If it is, you set up the meeting with a broader audience to let them hear your new music. If it’s not, you head back to the recording studio to amplify what worked and dampen what didn’t. You keep re-recording until your symphony is ready for the critics.

Things happen because artists who want to make a difference band together and make a difference. With no complicated Gantt chart, no master plan, no request for approval, and no additional resources, they make beautiful music where there had been none. As if from thin air, they create something from nothing. But it’s not from thin air; it’s from passion, dedication, trust, and mutual respect.

The business books over-complicate it. Things happen because people make them happen – it’s that simple.

If you’re working in a company you like, and you want it to be around in the future, you want to know if it will grow.  If you’re looking to move to a new company, you want to know if it has legs – you want to know if it will grow. If you own stock, you want to know if the company will grow, and it’s the same if you want to buy stock.  And it’s certainly the case if you want to buy the whole company – if it can grow, it’s worth more.

To grow, a company has to differentiate itself from its competitors.  In the past, continuous improvement (CI) was a differentiator, but today CI is the minimum expectation, the cost of doing business.  The differentiator for growth is discontinuous improvement (DI).

With DI, there’s an unhealthy fascination with idea generation.  While idea generation is important, companies aren’t short on ideas, they’re short on execution.  But the one DI differentiator is the flavor of the ideas.  To do DI a company needs ideas that are radically different than the ones they’re selling now.  If the ideas are slightly twisted variants of today’s products and business models, that’s a sure sign continuous improvement has infiltrated and polluted the growth engine. The gears of the DI engine are gummed up and there’s no way the company can sustain growth.  For objective evidence the company has the chops to generate the right ideas, look for a process that forces their thinking from the familiar, something like Jeffrey Baumgartner’s Anticonventional Thinking (ACT).

For DI-driven growth, the ability to execute is most important.  With execution, the first differentiator is how the company investigates radically new ideas.  There are three differentiators – a focus on speed, a “market first” approach, and the use of minimum viable tests (MVTs).  With new ideas, it’s all about how fast you can learn, so speed should come through loud and clear.  Without a market, the best idea is worthless, so look for “market first” thinking.  Idea evaluation starts with a hypothesis that a specific market exists (the market is clearly defined in the hypothesis) which is evaluated with a minimum viable test (MVT) to prove or disprove the market’s existence.  MVTs should error on the side of speed – small, localized testing.  The more familiar minimum viable product (MVP) is often an important part of the market evaluation work.  It’s all about learning about the market as fast as possible.

Now, with a validated market, the differentiator is how fast company can rally around the radically new idea and start the technology and product work.  The companies that can’t execute slot the new project at the end of their queue and get to it when they get to it.  The ones that can execute stop an existing (lower value) project and start the new project yesterday.  This stop-to-start behavior is a huge differentiator.

The company’s that can’t execute take a ready-fire-aim approach – they just start.  The companies that differentiate themselves use systems thinking to identify gaps in resources and capabilities and close them. They do the tough work of prioritizing one project over another and fully staff the important ones at the expense of the lesser projects.  Rather than starting three projects and finishing none, the companies that know how to do DI start one, finish one, and repeat.  They know with DI, there’s no partial credit for a project that’s half done.

All companies have growth plans, and at the highest level they all hang together, but some growth plans are better than others.  To judge the goodness of the growth plan takes a deeper look, a look into the work itself.  And once you know about the work, the real differentiator is whether the company has the chops to execute it.

Image credit – John Leach.

It’s harder than ever to innovate, and getting harder.

The focus on growth can be empowering, but when coupled with signed-in-blood accountability, empowering turns to puckering.  It’s an unfair double-bind. Damned if you try something new and it doesn’t work, and damned if you stay the course and don’t hit the numbers.  The most popular approach seems to be to do more of what worked.  A good approach, but not as good as it’s made out to be.

Doing more of what worked is good, and it works.  But it can’t stand on its own.  With today’s unreasonable workloads, every resource is fully booked and before doing more of anything, you’ve got to do less of something else.  ‘More of what worked’ must walk hand-in-hand with ‘Stop what didn’t work.’  Without stopping, without freeing up resources, ‘more of what worked’ is insufficient and unsustainable.

But even the two together are insufficient, and there’s a much needed third leg to stabilize the stool – ‘starting new work.’  Resources freed by stopping are allocated to starting new work, and this work, also known as innovation, is the major source of growth.

‘More of what worked’ is all about productivity – doing more with the same resources; and so is ‘stopping what didn’t work’ – reclaiming and reallocating ineffective resources. Both are important, but more importantly – they’re not innovation.

As you’re well aware, the rules are changing faster than ever, and at some point what worked last year won’t work this year. The only way to stay ahead of a catastrophe is to make small bets in unproven areas.  If the bets are successful, they turn into profitable innovation and growth. But the real value is the resiliency that comes from the ritualistic testing/learning cycles.

Going all-in on what worked last year is one of the riskiest bets you can make.

Things are cyclic, but there seems to be no end to the crusade of continuous improvement. (Does anyone remember how the Crusades turned out?) If only to take the edge off, there needs to be an injection of absurdity.

There’s no pressure with absurdity – no one expects an absurd idea to work.  If you ask for an innovative idea, you’ll likely get no response because there’s pressure from the expectation the innovative idea must be successful. And if you do get a response, you’ll likely get served a plain burrito of incremental improvement garnished with sour cream and guacamole to trick your eye and doused in hot sauce to trick your palate. If you ask for an absurd idea, you get laughter and something you’ve never heard before.

When drowning in the sea of standard work, it takes powerful mojo to save your soul.  And the absurdity jetpack is the only thing I know with enough go to launch yourself to the uncharted oasis of new thinking.  Immense force is needed because continuous improvement has serious mass – black hole mass. Like with light, a new idea gets pulled over the event horizon into the darkness of incremental thinking.  But absurdity doesn’t care.  It’s so far from the center lean’s pull is no match.

But to understand absurdity’s superpower is to understand what makes things absurd.  Things are declared absurd when they cut against the grain of our success.  It’s too scary to look into the bright sun of our experiences, so instead of questioning their validity and applicability, the idea is deemed absurd.  But what if the rules have changed and the fundamentals of last year’s success no longer apply?  What if the absurd idea actually fits with the new normal?  In a strange Copernican switch, holding onto to what worked becomes absurd.

Absurd ideas sometimes don’t pan out.  But sometimes they do.  When someone laughs at your idea, take note – you may be on to something.  Consider the laughter an artifact of misunderstanding, and consider the misunderstanding a leading indicator of the opportunity to reset customer expectations.  And if someone calls your idea absurd, give them a big hug of thanks, and get busy figuring out how to build a new business around it.

There’s a lot buzz around reinvention and innovation. There are countless articles on tools and best practices; many books on the best organizational structure, and plenty on roles and responsibilities.   There’s so much stuff that it’s tough to define what’s missing, even when what’s missing is the most important part. Whether its creativity, innovation, or doing new, the most important and missing element is your behavior.

Two simple rules to live by: 1) Look inside. 2) Then, change your behavior.

To improve innovation, people typically look to nouns for the answers – meeting rooms, work spaces, bean bag chairs, and tools, tools, tools.  But the answer isn’t nouns, the answer is verbs.  Verbs are action words, things you do, behaviors.  And there are two behaviors that make the difference: 1.) Take new action. 2) Speak new ideas.

To take new action, you’ve got to be perceptive, perceptive about what’s blocking you from taking new action.  The biggest blocker of new action is anxiety, and you must learn what anxiety feels like.  Thought the brain makes anxiety, it’s easiest to perceive anxiety in the body.  For me, anxiety manifests as a cold sinking feeling in my chest.  When I recognize the coldness, I know I’m anxious.  Your task is to figure out your anxiety’s telltale heart.

To learn what anxiety feels like, you’ve got to slow down enough to actually feel.  The easiest way for overbooked high performers to make time to slow down is to schedule a recurring meeting with yourself.  Schedule a recurring 15 minute meeting (Daily is best.) in a quiet place.  No laptop, no cell phone, no paper, no pencil, no headphones – just you and quiet sitting together.  Do this for a week and you’ll learn what anxiety feels like.

To take new action, you’ve got to be receptive, receptive to the anxiety.  You’ll naturally judge anxiety as bad, but that’s got to change.  Anxiety isn’t bad, it’s just unpleasant.  And in this case, anxiety is an indicator of importance.  When you block yourself from taking an important action, you create anxiety. So when you feel anxiety, be receptive – it’s your body telling you the yet-to-be-taken action is important.

After receptive, it’s time to be introspective.  Look inside, turn toward your anxiety, and understand why the task is important.  Typically it’s important because it threatens the status quo. Maybe it would dismantle your business model, or maybe it will unglue the foundation of your company, or maybe something smaller yet threatening.  Once you understand its importance, it’s time to use the importance as the forcing function to start the task first thing tomorrow morning.

The second magic behavior is to speak new ideas.  To speak new ideas, you’ve got to be perceptive to the reason you self censor.  Before you can un-censor, you’ve got to be aware you self censor.  It’s time to get in touch with your unsaid ideas.  Now that you no longer need the 15 minute meeting for taking new action, change the agenda to speaking new ideas. Again, no laptop, cell phone, and headphones, but this time it’s you and quiet figuring out what if feels like right before you self-censor.

In your meeting, remember back to a brainstorming session when you had a crazy idea, but decided to bury it.  Get in touch with what your body felt like as you stopped yourself from speaking your crazy idea.  That’s the feeling you want to be aware of because it’s a leading indicator of your self censoring behavior.

Next, it’s time to be receptive, receptive to the idea that just as you choose to self censor, you can choose to stop your self censorship, and receptive to the idea that there’s a deep reason for your behavior.

Now, it’s on to introspective.  When you have a crazy idea, why do you keep your mouth shut?  Turn toward the behavior and you may see you self censor because you don’t want to be judged.  If you utter a crazy idea, you may be afraid you’ll be judged as crazy or incompetent.  Likely, you’re afraid saying your idea out loud will change something – what other people think of you.

There are a couple important notions to help you battle your fear of judgment. First, you are not your ideas.  You can have wild ideas and be highly competent, highly valued, and a good person.  Second, other people’s judgment is about them, not you. They are threatened by your idea, and instead of looking inside, they protect themselves by trying to knock you down.

There’s a lot of nuance and complexity around creativity and innovation, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  Really, it comes down to four things: own your behavior, look inside, take new action, and speak new ideas.  It’s that simple.

The early explorers had maps, but they were wrong – sea monsters, missing continents, and the home country at the center.  Wrong, yes, but the best maps of their day.  The early maps weren’t right because the territory was new, and you can expect the same today. When you work in new territory, your maps are wrong.

As the explorers’ adventures radiated further from home, they learned and their maps improved.  But still, the maps were best close to home and diverged at the fringes.  And over the centuries the radius of rightness grew and the maps converged on the territory.  And with today’s GPS technology, maps are dead on.  The system worked – a complete map of everything.

Today you have your maps of  your business environment and the underlying fundementals that ground them.  Like the explorers you built them over time and checked them along the way.  They’re not perfect (more right close to home) but they’re good.  You mapped the rocks, depths, and tides around the trade routes and you stay the course because the routes have delivered profits and they’re safe. You can sail them in your sleep, and sometimes you do.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the explorers’ maps and yours – their territory, the physical territory, never changed, but yours is in constant flux.  The business trade winds shift as new technologies develop; the size of continents change as developing countries develop; and new rocks grow from the sea floor as competitors up their game.  Just when your maps match the territory, the territory changes around you and diverges from your maps, and your maps become old.  The problem is the maps don’t look different.  Yes, they’re still the same maps that guided you safely along your journey, but they no longer will keep you safely off the rocks and out of the Doldrums.

But as a new age explorer there’s hope.  With a healthy skepticism of your maps, frequently climb the mast and from the crow’s nest scan the horizon for faint signs of trouble.  Like a thunder storm just below the horizon, you may not hear trouble coming, but there’ll be dull telltale flashes that flicker in your eyepiece.  Not all the crew will see them, or want to see them, or want to believe you saw them, so be prepared when your report goes unheeded and your ship sales into the eye of the storm.

Weak signals are troubling for several reasons.  They’re infrequent and unpredictable which makes them hard to chart, and they’re weak so they’re tough to hear and interpret.  But worst of all is their growth curve.  Weak signals stay weak for a long time until they don’t, and when they grow, they grow quickly.  A storm just over the horizon gives weak signals right up until you sail into gale force winds strong enough to capsize the largest ships.

Maps are wrong when the territory is new, and get more right as you learn; but as the territory changes and your learning doesn’t, maps devolve back to their natural wrongness.  But, still, they’re helpful.  And they’re more helpful when you remember they have a natural half-life.

My grandfather was in the Navy in World War II, though he could never bring himself to talk about it. However, there was one thing he told me, a simple saying he said kept him safe:

Red skies at night, sailor’s delight; red skies in morninng, sailor takes warning.

I think he knew the importance of  staying aware of the changing territory.

What’s a new market worth without a new technology to capture it? The same as a new technology without a new market – not much. Technology and market are a matched set, but not like peanut butter and jelly, (With enough milk, a peanut butter sandwich isn’t bad.) rather, more like H₂ and O: whether it’s H₂ without O or O without H₂ – there’s no water. With technology and market, there’s no partial credit – there’s nothing without both.

You’d think with such a tight coupling, market and technology would be highly coordinated, but that’s not the case. There’s a deep organizational chasm between them. But worse, each has their own language, tools, and processes. Plain and simple, the two organizations don’t know how to talk to each other, and the result is the wrong technology for the right market (if you’re a marketer) or the right technology for the wrong market (if you’re a technologist.) Both ways, customers suffer and so do business results.

The biggest difference, however, is around customers. Where marketers pull, technologists push – can’t be more different than that. But neither is right, both are. There’s no sense arguing which is more important, which is right, or which worked better last time because you need both. No partial credit.

If you speak only French and have a meeting with someone who speaks only Portuguese, well, that’s like meeting between marketers and technologists. Both are busy as can be, and neither knows what the other is doing. There’s a huge need for translators – marketers that speak technologist and technologists that talk marketing. But how to develop them?

The first step is to develop a common understanding of why. Why do you want to develop the new market? Why hasn’t anyone been able to create the new market? Why can’t we develop a new technology to make it happen? It’s a good start when both sides have a common understanding of the whys.

To transcend the language barrier, don’t use words, use video. To help technologists understand unmet customer needs, show them a video of a real customer in action, a real customer with a real problem. No words, no sales pitch, just show the video. (Put your hand over your mouth if you have to.) Show them how the work is done, and straight away they’ll scurry to the lab and create the right new technologies to help you crack the new market. Technologists don’t believe marketers; technologists believe their own eyes, so let them.

To help marketers understand technology, don’t use words, use live demos. Technologists – set up a live demo to show what the technology can do. Put the marketer in front of the technology and let them drive, but you can’t tell them how to drive. You too must put your hand over your mouth. Let them understand it the way they want to understand it, the way a customer would understand it. They won’t use it the way you think they should, they’ll use it like a customer. Marketers don’t understand technology, they understand their own eyes, so let them.

And after the videos and the live demos, it’s time to agree on a customer surrogate. The customer surrogate usually takes the form of a fully defined test protocol and fully defined test results. And when done well, the surrogate generates test results that correlate with goodness needed to crack the new market. As the surrogate’s test results increase, so does goodness (as the customer defines it.) Instead of using words to agree on what the new technology must do, agreement is grounded in a well defined test protocol and a clear, repeatable set of test results. Everyone can use their eyes to watch the actual hardware being tested and see the actual test results. No words.

To close the loop and determine if everyone is on the same page, ask the marketers and technologist to co-create the marketing brochure for the new product. Since the brochure is written for the customer, it forces the team use plain language which can be understood by all. No marketing jargon or engineering speak – just plain language.

And now, with the marketing brochure written, it’s time to start creating the right new market and the right new technology.

Photo credit – TORLEY.

To do innovation, you’ve got to be all in, both physically and mentally.  And to be all in, you’ve got to bust through one of the most powerful forces on the planet – denial.

Denial exists because seeing things as they are is scary. Denial prevents you from seeing problems so you can protect yourself from things that are scary. But the dark consequence of its protection is you block yourself from doing new things, from doing innovation.  Because you deny the truth of how things are, you don’t acknowledge problems; and because you don’t admit there’s a problem, there’s no forcing function for doing the difficult work of innovation.

Problems threaten, but problems have power.  Effectively harnessed, problems can be powerful enough to bust through denial.  But before you can grab them by the mane, you have to be emotionally strong enough to see them.  You have to be ready to see them; you have to be in the right mindset to see them; and because your organization will try to tear you down when you point to a big problem, you have to have a high self worth to stand tall.

Starting an innovation project is the toughest part and most important part.  Starting is the most important because 100% of all innovations projects that don’t start, fail. Those aren’t good odds.  And because starting is so emotionally difficult, people with high self worth are vital.  Plain and simple: they’re strong enough to start.

Denial helps you stay in your comfort zone, but that’s precisely where you don’t want to be.  To change and grow you’ve got to breach the wall of denial, and climb out of your comfort zone.

It’s difficult to do something for the first time. Whether it’s a new approach, a new technology, or a new campaign, the mass of the past pulls our behavior back toward itself.  And sadly, whether the past has been successful or not, its mass, and therefore it’s pull, are about the same.  The past keeps us along the track of sameness.

Trains have tracks to enable them to move efficiently (cost per mile), and when you want to go where the train is heading, it’s all good. But when the tracks are going to the wrong destination, all that efficiency comes at the expense of effectiveness.  Like we’re on rails, company history keeps us on track, even if it’s time for a new direction.

The best trains run on a ritualistic schedule.  People queue up at same time every morning to meet their same predictable behemoth, and take comfort in slinking into their regular seats and turning off their brains.  And this is the train’s trick. It uses its regularity to lull riders into a hazy state of non-thinking – get on, sit down, and I’ll get your there – to blind passengers from seeing its highly limited timetable and its extreme inflexibility.  The train doesn’t want us to recognize that it’s not really about where the train wants to go.

Trains are powerful in their own right, but their real muscle comes from the immense sunk cost of their infrastructure. Previous generations invested billions in train stations, repair facilities, tight integration with bus lines, and the tracks, and it takes extreme strength of character to propose a new direction that doesn’t make use of the old, tired infrastructure that’s already paid for. Any new direction that requires a whole new infrastructure is a tough sell, and that’s why the best new directions transcend infrastructure altogether.  But for those new directions that require new infrastructure, the only way to go is a modular approach that takes the right size bites.

Our worn tracks were laid in a bygone era, and the important destinations of yesteryear are no longer relevant. It’s no longer viable to go where the train wants; we must go where we want.