Sat, Sep 15, 2007
How to not boil lobsters: strategy keeps projects on track
If your team knows what your strategy is, then they know where you're going, and your less likely to end up somewhere else.
Joel Spolsky writes about drastically realigning the design on the new website. "Drastically realigning" is corporate-speak for scrapping the whole thing and starting over.
Joel's post reminds me of a story I saw Douglas Adams tell at a lecture in the early 90s:
Lobster think
Apparently, throwing a lobster into a vat of boiling water is a little cruel. You throw them in, they writhe about, die in agony without so much as a smidgeon of dignity.
On the other hand, if you put a lobster into a pot of cold water that's over the fire, the lobster doesn't mind. When the water gets warmer, the lobster thinks: "It's only one degree warmer. The previous temperature was okay, so one degree warmer is okay, too."
Then the water gets warmer, and the lobster thinks again: "It's only one degree warmer. The previous temperature was okay, so one degree warmer is okay, too."
This goes on and on until, finally, the water is boiling, and the lobster sits there, looking very dignified, obviously very deep in lobster thought.
Joel and his design firm were boiling a lobster instead of designing a website. How do you stop yourself from making the same mistake?
Lobster strategy
Basic lobster strategy goes like this: if you do not want to be boiled, do not get into a pot.
This sounds very silly, but we paid a very senior lobster consultant (with suspicious burn marks) a LOT of money to tell us this. He told us in person, put it in a PowerPoint, and made a nice, BIG, pretty poster with arrows and bars and iconographic pictures of lobsters and pots and grim reapers.
Obviously, Joel and his design team know better than to boil a lobster. They're trying to design a website, for crissakes! And in the original meeting, I bet everyone at the table agreed they would not put any lobsters in any pots.
So what happened? Joel sums it up:
Links had sprouted up all over the place, making it hard to tell where to go next and where you've already been. Most of the elegant whitespace in the original design was lost when we went from the original 1024 pixel wide design to an 800 pixel design.
In essence, they forgot their rule about lobsters and pots. Someone had a change that brought in a lobster. And then someone else had a change that introduced a pot. And then somehow they added some water. And then somehow the lobster ended up in the pot...
If everyone knows the strategy for your project specifically states no lobsters in no pots, ever, then when someone else walks in with a lobster, everyone at the table can say "no".
The worst part about Joel's story, somewhere along the way, the smart people at the table noticed the lobster, and the pot, and the water, and either they said nothing, or they said something, but not in a way anyone understood.
Joel's absolutely right that good design is a process of learning what's wrong, and sometimes you learn later, rather than sooner.
The take away is that you need to be comfortable being wrong. If you think you see a lobster, stand on the conference table and scream out loud: THAT IS A LOBSTER!
Maybe it's not a lobster. Maybe it's a polar bear and everyone will laugh at you. But if it is a lobster, and another smart person at the table agrees with you...
I look forward to a day where lobsters can live long, fulfilling lives without the fear of being boiled alive.
Talk About "How to not boil lobsters: strategy keeps projects on track"