The Search for Spock: It’s Only Logical

In the world of the product development process, there are trends and there are constants. A trend is something like “Six Sigma” and a constant is something like “metrics.” Before I get a lot of hate e-mail from the black belt community, I consider all branded process methods to be trends—I just picked Six Sigma for its name recognition. Even the United States of America could be considered a trend. Trends are unstable, they may not last forever, but constants like measurement are rock solid, a major underlying component of all processes.

This is true for many things, including innovation. Tony Ulwick, the author of What Customers Want, calls this “Outcome-Driven Logic.” When compiling the features of a product concept, his methodology leads you to find the stable customer requirements to focus on. His classic example is music delivery. You can listen to vinyl, a compact disc (CD), or an MP3, all on different hardware, but the underlying customer value (audio consumption) remains the same for all of them, the innovation being in how each improves quality, cost, convenience, and the like. Understanding this is very important, just ask anyone who made their living from CDs, floppy disk drives, newspapers, and other victims of disruptive technology.

Now back to metrics. Good metrics are constantly in high demand by all managers. People are always looking for the objectivity of data, the ability to bolster decision-making trust that only the cold logic of math can supply. The right metric can give you decision foresight, put opposing team members on the same page and garner upper management support or even funding. The wrong metric can cost you millions of dollars and possibly your job. So yes, they are important. This is the power of numbers.

Business and product development metrics are basically an application of “game theory.” Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, father of the Theory of Constraints (TOC), once explained how metrics affect project teams by saying, “Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave,” another way of saying the more common maxim, “What gets measured, gets done.” This is not meant to reduce human work to a Pavlovian level; it is an honest look at reality. One of the most creative metrics I’ve heard about over the years is measuring the performance of design engineers based on the manufacturing yield of their build schematics. These engineers upgraded their design for manufacturing/assembly (DFM/A) skills and communications with shop floor personnel in short order.

But while the results of metrics can be positive, they can also have a negative affect on morale and attitude, so one must always be careful of the unintended consequences of performance measures and remember that people are not machines and have complex behavioral reactions. While it is relatively easy to apply metrics to the product (e.g., physical tolerances of materials, temperature limits, MTBF, etc.), it is much harder to apply them to people. Human beings are adaptive, and like zoo monkeys that figure out how to get bananas out of the suspended box, humans have a knack for workarounds, particularly if a metric is tied to compensation.

Dr. Goldratt was once asked about the difficulty managing people, especially when you have certain individuals on the team that act “illogically.” His reply: “Nobody acts illogically. Everyone’s behavior is perfectly logical, it’s just that you may not know what the logic is that they are operating under. Once you figure out that logic, you will know exactly what they will do.” In the same session (from around 2000), he also said “I work with Israeli intelligence analyzing Saddam Hussein and using TOC I can predict his behavior with great accuracy.” I’m just going to assume he was exaggerating.

The lesson here is that almost all things can be stripped down using a logic-based analysis. Once you can identify the driving force behind a specific behavior, then you can unlock the key to its manipulation. In the innovation example, once you determine that the outcome value of a car that affects its market success is affordable transportation, then you can make smart design decisions like choosing lighter materials for greater fuel efficiency. With people, once you learn that cash rewards for staff patent filings cause engineers to neglect projects, you can rethink that part of your recognition program.

One bad assumption is that logic must always be the Vulcan type, stark and emotionless. But as Dr. Goldratt correctly identifies, emotion is just a different form of logic, perhaps more complex and with more branches of variables. Illogic does not really exist; it’s just what happens when something doesn’t match the rule set of the observer. We see this in quantum mechanics every day. Newtonian physics explains our observable world, but all scientists agree that there is a whole lot more going on under the hood of the universe that our known laws can not explain. We must assume that this is the case in all things. Everything is following a rule; we’re just not all playing the same game. It’s only logical.