"Yes, and..." your solution

A lesson from improv

There’s a moment from an improv class I took many years ago that sticks with me to this day. Two people are on stage, opposite each other, a few metres apart. The prompt is: give your undivided attention to your partner, and mirror them. What do you think happens?

Nothing, you're both standing still, looking at each other? Wrong! Magic happens.

With nothing planned, apart from the commitment to be mindful and treat the other person as an equal partner, carefully mirroring their mirroring, adjusting slightly, and making tiny copying errors from one blink of an eye to another, you go in absolutely unpredictable directions.

Figure 1: A double pendulum in a state of chaos.

Today I want to talk about product discovery and ideas in Marty Cagan’s book TRANSFORMED.

In its early chapter we learn about three key areas of transformation that a company needs to undertake to embrace a disruptiveness as a core competency:

1. How we build

2. How we solve

3. How we choose what to solve

Let’s dive into 2: discovering a solution to a problem. The author makes a strong case for empowering the product—design—engineering triumvirate, rather than have them act in a top-down managed feature factory.

In the improv analogy, the steps to success are:

1. Rapid prototypes: tiny, organic moves that cause a user reaction

2. Mindful user observation: a tight feedback loop between actors

3. Sensing how the solution performs: listening to the audience’s reaction

The book acknowledges that it almost always takes many iterations to arrive at a solution that works, hence the underlined importance of rapid prototyping.

This brings me back to the world of comedy. Great stand-up comedians experiment, adapt, hone, and brutally rewrite their “bits,” their pieces of routine. It takes a year of showcasing to get to a strong hour long show ready for a streaming service special, but the iterations, feedback loops, and adjustments happen nightly.

There is something exhilarating about pushing the boundaries of the unknown, with no preconceptions, to discover an answer that’s surprising and beyond any one individual’s imagination. This magic comes from a fusion of people’s ideas interacting with reality. There’s art - and very often comedy - in engineering an outcome.

Improv classes have been a surprisingly powerful way to overcoming anxiety about uncertainty and becoming comfortable with The Unknown and The Unplanned. Shout out to Meave Ryan and Steve Roe from Hoopla.

#forces