“I think we are not in Kansas anymore,” Dorothy said after she landed in Oz, and she remains right today.
The forces that were in place to shape the commercial practices during the 20th century were completely transformed by the thunderstorm of connectivity. We were thrown into a new age and a new era, one that is powered by services and where people strive for relevance instead of variety.
The old marketing school of thought that taught us to launch offerings into the market and use brute force to make them appealing to consumers is outdated and inefficient. Sure, one can insist upon it, but will then probably waste tons of money and resources on things that don’t translate into real value to customers. Organizations that continue to practice this approach today are bleeding and exposed. To make it worse, this red ocean is full of fast and furious sharks. And they know that.
The “make and sell” strategies of yesterday are crippled and unable to perform smoothly in this new economy. Similarly, the scientific approach alone is unable to provide enough variety and human empathy for a business to stay relevant to the people it is meant to serve.
Yes, we live in a service economy — sadly, a collapsed one. To mention a Metallica song, our three primary mass-service structures are broken, beaten and scarred.
Our educational system was designed to prepare workers to perform basic operations at factories. The standardization of school programs was not by accident, but an intentional plan designed to create an infinite pool of human resources ready to be extracted by industries. Schools were designed to function exactly like factories, with our children treated as its raw materials.
Urban mobility services were originally designed to help factory workers commute to their jobs in the cities and to support production distribution. Nowadays, what factories? The future points to people printing their own stuff, and the remaining industrial facilities are not located in the main urban centers anymore. So why do we still commute in the same way factory workers did in 1900?
The healthcare service was created during the early industrial days. The idea was to scale health in order to extend it to the fast-growing urban population. The system was designed using scientific approaches as a foundation, and the hospital was conceived to function like a factory, only with more white and you riding the production belt.
Every startup is fueled by a rebellious instinct against the status quo. The main purpose of being small and still entering a market is to disrupt it, and propose a new and improved way to do things. In order to be successful on doing that, startups should not mirror our smoky, industrial past and rely only on scientific approaches to production. That would be to insist on repeating the same mistakes that brought us here.
The Lean Startup movement made it clear that startups need to move fast and keep waste at a minimum. However, it lacks empathy-building and co-design practices, the two main ingredients to orchestrating services that are more human, sustainable and adapted to survival in today’s economy.
As we can see by historical analysis, the scientific approach alone is not capable of feeding those attributes. In order to do that, you will need design.
However, I am not talking here about the same model of engagement practiced by Design agencies over the past few decades. This traditional, big account-oriented approach makes it very difficult for startups to engage and benefit from Design.
I am talking about a new engagement model, one that is fast-paced and structured for constant learning. Not only that, but a model that democratizes Design, allowing everyone to apply its thinking to the development of human-centric solutions.
The MVS model opens space for startups to instill Design into their fast-paced development cycles. It was designed to help project teams avoid bad development decisions by integrating empathy immersions, co-design and early prototyping practices into their making.
In the MVS::Humanize mood, the team runs through generative stages where they deep dive into users’ perspectives and co-design projections with them. In the MVS::Crystallize mood, the project team moves into the refinement stages. This is where they give their projections a good reality check, testing them against real-world variables and improving them along with users throughout early experience-prototyping sessions.
After a full MVS round, the project team ends up with a clear Build Backlog composed of a minimum offer forged in alignment with users’ uncovered needs, desires and mental models. This better informs the development of the solution, fostering assertiveness and therefore minimizing waste.
My wish is that the concepts and tools presented in this book help you better navigate the uncertainties of developing solutions in the actual complex soup of problems and collapsed systems our society faces. The MVS was created to help startups craft services that are relevant, convey meaning, and help people live and work better.
Onward!
Tenny Pinheiro