We Need Innovation in Corporate Structure

This morning I came across an article called Michigan Workers Must Build a New Mind-set. I could not agree more. In fact we all need to build a new mind-set to meet the new economy that just pulled into the train station. An icon of the way things are "supposed" to be, is now bankrupt. General Motors was more than a company. It was a belief system. People believed they could get a public education, join a big corporation, maybe move up the ladder a little bit, and retire comfortably. To quote: "It's hard to say that the folks hurt most by GM's decline -- the thousands who have lost their jobs and the thousands more who will -- did anything wrong. They bought into a system that rewarded work with "golden handcuffs.'" Jim Collins, of Good to Great fame, had this to say in a recent article in Inc Magazine. "What's the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. [When you join a big firm] You've just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else. As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else's company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don't exist. You just can't see them, and so you can't manage them. That's a much more exposed position." We are moving uphill, trying to close the gap between our expectations of what the World will offer us, and the reality of the changes we are facing. Innovation in corporate structuring can help us get over this hump and into the future of work life. Look at what the the "copy left" movement has done for software with the General Public License and creative materials with the Creative Commons. The move is already being made by companies like Mozilla and SRC Holdings, but we can go even further. With the Fireworks Project we are committed to a member managed organizational structure, and we're doing this with the help of a new statute in the US state of Vermont called a 'virtual company'. It is a piece of legislation that is just the beginning of the changes that we need to see in corporate structuring while putting General Motors behind us.

Designing Life Experience

The main purpose of our new company, the Fireworks Project, is to find a better way to work and live. In our current capacity, we build software, focusing on improving the user experience design process. However, what we are really trying to do is design a better work experience. I believe the world is at a technological and cultural cross roads that is going to allow us to improve our quality of life with a greater degree of success than we ever have before. The tool we're using to do this is an open, member managed organizational structure. I came across "A Summer of Fun" manifesto the other day and I hope the Fireworks Project can live up to that. If you have not checked out this little tid bit, then you should go take a peek at it now.

Long live the Internet!

I just had an interesting twitter conversation with @pfinette who had recently done a presentation for students at the Royal College of Art in the UK he called "The browser is the new black". He discovered that there are some students there who are not overly excited about the World Wide Web as a place to innovate. I must say, I agree with that sentiment. I agree so much, I've started a whole company based on the idea that the World Wide Web has been extended as far as it can go. The World Wide Web is a system of linked documents, whereas the Internet is a network if data sharing. The Internet is the platform on which the WWW was built, and will continue to be the platform for additional innovation. That is something to get excited about. The WWW is not dead, but there is certainly room for another great innovation along side it on the Internet.

Customer Service is User Experience

A political campaign, a not-for-profit, a business. They all have something in common: A movement. Does the political campaign have volunteers or followers? Does the not-for-profit have donors or community members? Does the business have customers or fans? In the future, change will be made by movements, not by pushing products or ideas. How does that change customer service? Maybe customer service should be reinvented within the "user experience design" ubrella. To build a strong following, a large membership, or devoted fans we need to deliver an experience. In the economy of the future, experience = value. There are too many organizations out there that are going to fail simply because they do not recognize the move from marketing and customer service to user experience design. Can you remember the last time you told a friend about a good product? How about the last time you told a friend about a great experience with an organization? See the difference? Gentle Giant Moving Company gets it. Zappos gets it. "Zappos does not have specific policies for dealing with each customer service situation. He (the CEO, Tony Hsieh) claims that the company's culture allows it to do extraordinary things. I saw him make this point earlier this year in New York City, when he told a story about a woman whose husband died in a car accident after she had ordered boots for him from Zappos. The day after she called to ask for help with the return, she received a flower delivery. The call center rep had ordered the flowers without checking with a supervisor and billed them to the company. "At the funeral, the widow told her friends and family about the experience," Hsieh said, his voice cracking and his eyes tearing up ever so slightly. "Not only was she a customer for life, but so were those 30 or 40 people at the funeral."" Inc Magazine article. Seth Godin gets it. Blog Post Video Microsoft does not get it. The Fireworks Project will be built to deliver a great experience to everyone that touches it.

The Challenge of Open Design

Open design is getting a bunch of people together, often without any face to face contact, and designing something that everyone in the World will love. This is hard to do with a closed design process, and even harder to do with an open design process. So why do it? I believe, as do many other people, that open design holds far more potential than closed design because of the larger talent pool that can take part in the process. The problem is that this is a young discipline, and there is still a lot we don't know about it. Because of it's immature status, open design often ends in failure, and many of the participants concede that it cannot work. But, open design can survive and thrive if we are persistent and continue to document the lessons of our failures as well as success. So, to kick off design within the Fireworks Project, I thought I would start by outlining a theory of how the open design process might work, using another blog post by Aza Raskin as a jumping off point. Aza is the lead on user experience with Mozilla Labs, among many many other things. One of the latest projects he is working on is Ubiquity, which used an open design process to create the latest logo. Aza was gracious enough to document the lessons they learned from the process, giving us a leg up to begin our own experimentation. With the Fireworks Project, we also have the perfect opportunity to try out open design with our own logo creation process. The objective is to create a great logo, but also to reach a state of design thinking through the process of design. This is my vision of the process: Focus What is the design objective and what are the constraints? Identifying what the project is not rather than what it is can be a helpful exercise at this point. A clear focus for the project will provide a visible rubric for judging our work as we move through the design process. Lead Designate a leader for the project that will facilitate discussion, incorporate feedback, and keep the iterations moving. A good leader will ask focused, concrete questions that get focused, concrete feedback. Iterate The design process will need to iterate many times to get a good result in the end. Each iteration is a three step process: 1. Expand the idea into as many corners of our creative minds as we can. Open design projects will be particularly good at that. 2. Revise and "sketch" out most of the ideas. Sketch is defined in this context as anything that acts as an aide to our thought processes, not necessarily the common pencil and paper. 3. Narrow the body of work with a structured critique process. This step relies heavily on the Focus part of the design. What are we trying to achieve, what are our constraints, and what are we not trying to do? We need to plan for many iterations and accept that the process will take some time. We cannot cut the process off prematurely because we become impatient. Communicate Effective communication is constant communication. Use every tool available. Blog about ideas, use Twitter, instant chat, and news groups. Wait Ideas need time to sink in, and inspiration never seems to strike whenever we snap our fingers. Leave the project behind, move on with life, and then get back to it with a fresh mind for the next iteration. I tried to sum this theory up with a diagram inspired by Sketching User Experiences. Concepts are fed into the process on the left, and emerge in a refined state on the right. Each vertical bar in the diagram represents an iteration of the design process. This diagram has 5 iterations, but there could be more or less, depending on what it takes to reach the desired outcome outlined in the Focus. Also, some iterations explore additional possibilities while others refine ideas toward the Focus. This is represented by the black lines that end in a point on the right. Follow along to see how well we do.