Three reasons to tackle the hard problems, right now.
It’s common for businesses to prioritize solving the easy problems while delaying the greater efforts needed to solve the hard problems. It’s usually a low-risk (at least short-term), low-effort and low-cost approach that can return incremental advantages within a single budget cycle. The collective and cumulative effects of that habit are that we usually witness the emergence of parity stop-gap solutions across an industry. Eventually parity leads to price comparisons and margin reduction until some entity finally takes on the risk of investing enough time and treasure to take on the hard problem.
On the economy, ice caps and COVID-19
A few weeks back, I was listening to an episode of the podcast “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe,” and the host, Steven Novella, was discussing the asymmetrical time frames of destruction and restoration when considering the fate of the polar ice caps. If we do nothing about climate change, the models show a significant decline in the ice caps over the next 100 years and a total disappearance within a thousand years. The next point, however, was the one that struck me as most serious. Even if we reverse all of our carbon dioxide levels and cool the climate to pre-industrial levels, once those ice caps are gone, it would take millions of years for them to build back up.
What’s the difference between UX and UI?
For any experience to truly connect with people, it must engage both halves of their brain. Now, we understand that this mythical separation of domain between the right and left hemispheres of the brain is more rooted in pop culture than science, but it is still an apt framework for this discussion. While some like to say UX and UI are two sides of the same coin, I think it’s more apt to call them two halves of the same brain. The analytical versus the aesthetic. The data versus the qualia. The objective versus the subjective. You get the idea. But what does that mean for how we might understand the individual disciplines themselves?
Brainstorming vs. Ideation
You’ve undoubtedly been in brainstorming sessions. Some of these sessions have likely been fruitful, others disappointing. We often get asked how ideation is different from brainstorming on “Brilliant.”— a podcast hosted by Magnani’s president. One guest distinguished the two types of sessions by asserting most brainstorms are simply “meetings… with better food.” But beyond that perhaps undeserved jab at brainstorming, there are several aspects that separate brainstorms from formal ideation.
What is futurecasting (and why should you care)?
There are two paths to innovation. One resides in our timeline just beyond now—solving a problem that exists today with technologies and resources available today. For comparison’s sake, let’s call it simple forecasting. The other path resides in our timeline years into the future—solving a problem that is, at least according to the tea leaves of trends and R&D pipelines, imminent, using technologies or resources that may not be currently available. That’s futurecasting.
Tesla’s innovation is in the doghouse
Watching the world’s automakers respond (or not, as the case may be) to Tesla, has been interesting, to say the least. I find it fascinating to see an established market watch a competitor waltz in and secure a beachhead in a successful new category, with a near-zero response from the established powers for years.
Five sensational gift ideas for the innovator in your life
Innovators are notoriously tough people to buy gifts for. They’re early adopters, so the stuff they likely want isn’t on sale yet, or worse, they couldn’t wait and already bought whatever it is for themselves. They get bored easily, so to be worth our effort and hard-earned dollars, the things you buy for them really need to offer thoughtful and engaging enough experiences to bring them back, time and time again. So, how can you find something truly sensational to give them? We thought it might make sense to talk about some of the most innovative items available, one sense at a time!
Three reasons Uber should never have invested in self-driving technology.
There’s a classic Venn diagram generally attributed to Ideo’s Tim Brown that points to the reality that for an idea to be considered an innovation, it needs to satisfy three criteria: desirability (people would want it), feasibility (it is something that can realistically be created) and viability (it can be made and offered in a way that makes financial sense for the business). Academics or inspired home tinkerers may be satisfied with any combination of one or two of these qualities, but a business, especially a publicly held business, needs to satisfy all three.
Looking for big corporate innovations? Think small.
What most people forget about the most game-changing innovations is that, more often than not, they satisfied some unmet basic need in a simple way. The breadth and complexity of the effect of that innovation came later, as more and more people found more and more ways to utilize that innovation to address some variation of the original need. Keeping that in mind, if you’re charged with corporate innovation, there are a lot of reasons to focus on simple, small innovations. Let’s explore!
Corporate Innovation: Breaking Through Organizational Barriers
I’m not sure who first promoted the idea that the greatest determiner of whether a corporation could successfully innovate is an ill-defined, immeasurable quality named “agility.” I am sure that the individual in question had a penchant for oversimplification. Just do a search for “agile business” books on Amazon, and the results are well over the 2,000 result threshold where Amazon stops counting. It’s not that a company shouldn’t have the qualities linked to the idea of agility. It’s just that agility is an emergent condition resulting from a number of more easily quantified and measurable behaviors.
Three signs of success that should make you want to innovate.
In business, we should always celebrate our successes. We should all find happiness and take comfort in classic, somewhat irrefutable, business metrics, like returning a healthy net profit, growing sales and customer loyalty, to name a few. But there are anecdotal success measures most people repeat that, while they directionally point to good things, should also have you start asking whether they actually are signs of a problem. Let’s look at three of the most common.
AI Writers: Have we reached peak content?
This week’s blog post, “AI Writers: Have we reached peak content?” was written almost entirely by an AI content generator in under four minutes using a service called AIWriter (ai-writer.net).
How to Develop a Digital Employee Experience Strategy
It’s a time-worn cliché. Businesses are so busy serving customers that they often neglect to improve the experiences of their own employees. Enter Digital Employee Experience design or DEX.
The three most important trends in health care experience design for 2019
Over the past 30+ years, Magnani has had the pleasure of working with clients across a variety of industries—from health care to hospitality, industrial equipment to medical devices, household cleaning products to sporting goods, dining cruises to the world’s most highly traded financial derivatives contracts, just to name a few. Each engagement has broadened our collective perspectives while confirming one underlying truth: Regardless of emerging trends, ongoing changes in technologies or the idiosyncrasies of individual markets, the fundamentals of human nature remain constant.
What is ASMR? (And should your CX team care?)
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) refers to a tingling, or at least pleasant, sensation some people feel when they hear what can be best described as soft scraping, tapping or rustling sounds. Most commonly, those sounds are something like the gravelly sound of a whispering human voice, two sheets of paper slipping past each other, soft tapping on a something hollow, a plastic bag being crumpled or just about anything similar that is recorded through a microphone placed extremely close to the sound source. But ASMR can also be triggered by something tactile, like peeling the protective plastic off of a brand-new television screen, or visual by the movement of hands or lips.