Serious Play

Forget the old saying, all work and no play. World-class companies today need play--serious play--if they want to make truly innovative products, argues Michael Schrage, an MIT Media Lab fellow and Fortune magazine columnist. In Serious Play he writes, "When talented innovators innovate, you don't listen to the specs they quote. You look at the models they've created". Whether it's a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behaviour that play--be it modelling, prototyping, or simulation--inspires.

Schrage examines the approaches to successful prototyping at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft and DaimlerChrysler and describes the kind of culture that's needed for encouraging innovation. In the last chapter, he lays out the 10 rules of serious play, including: be willing to fail early and often; know when the costs outweigh the benefits; know who wins and who loses from an innovation; build a prototype that engages customers, vendors and colleagues; create markets around prototypes; and simulate the customer experience. Well written and inspiring, Serious Play, is a first-rate user's guide for managers, project leaders and other innovators. --Dan Ring, Amazon.com

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An excellent perspective on prototypes and simulations. - Rated
Schrage makes clear that there is much more value to prototypes and simulations than learning about the developing concept. The prototypes and simulations can also teach us about the development of the designers involved. Using a mixture of Design and IT case studies the book puts forward a sound argument for making more use of prototyping and simulations, to improve quality and success.

The most significant metric is perceived mean-time-topayback - Rated
Any book with a foreword from Tom Peters (Read! Act! Now!) has to be approached with caution. This one passes the test. There have been books about innovation and rapid prototyping; about shortening mean-time-to-market. This is a 'mean' book, well written with the potential for rapid payback. It's central thesis is that organisations manage themselves by managing their prototypes.

Subtitled "How the world's best companies simulate to innovate", Serious Play is about the kind of inspired innovation that can only be (relatively) safely achieved within a model or simulation. The classic example must be the Boeing 777. Nowadays, the tools are available and at negligible real cost, to enable modelling and simulation to be carried out at will, often, but, most of all, NOW!

The classic computer-based modelling medium is the software spreadsheet. This was the system to be seen with. Within five years of its invention by Dan Brinklin, a Harvard Business School student in 1979, VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers, over one million spreadsheets were being sold annually.

As the cost of computing falls even faster than computer power and capacity grow, it is economically viable to 'waste' modelling time and iteration in search of innovation. Knowing where and when to pause for a moment (but never stop) is the real issue.

Bit while simulation should be a source of innovative surprise and increasing serendipity, it will also be the breeding ground of disruption and dissension. Modelling can and will produce results that are not only surprising but can be profoundly disturbing for those directly affected. It is still rare for managers enthusiastically to design themselves out of a job. Who owns the model (marketing, production, design or even the customer) matters as well as who benefits from the successful introduction of the resulting innovations. This will be test that separates the chic from the gauche in the 21st Century.

Models without metrics are meaningless. The most significant measurement, however, is not mean-time-to-market but customers' perceived mean-time-to-payback. The success of VisiCalc was due in largest measure to the perception that, including the cost of buying a PC and learning how to use the software, the payback time was less than two weeks. Therein lies the final message.

With endless iteration possible at near to nil cost, the 'model' for the development of models that "s(t)imulate to innovate" is more biological evolution rather than inorganic IT. Increasingly, innovation will evolve from the computer as the product of rapid iteration than as the step by step process of design.