17: It’s not the years, it’s the mileage

2009-08-12 18:28:37

If you’re going to reach inno­v­a­tive out­comes on a rou­tine basis, you need to match the right team to the oppor­tu­nity.? Part of that means under­stand­ing Prin­ci­ple 7 so that you know what type of prob­lem you’re tack­ling, the other part involves under­stand­ing what kind of expe­ri­ence you need on your team.? When it comes to answer­ing that last ques­tion, the right kind of expe­ri­ence pro­file depends on whether you’re look­ing at a high or low vari­ance sit­u­a­tion.? Exam­ples of low vari­ance sit­u­a­tions are fly­ing a 747 from San Fran­cisco to Sin­ga­pore, oper­at­ing on a heart, or serv­ing up burg­ers at In-N-Out.? In each of those sit­u­a­tions, we desire a pre­dictable out­come deliv­ered with a low degree of vari­ance from a pre­de­ter­mined stan­dard, and in this con­text, the right expe­ri­ence is expressed in terms of hav­ing done the same thing many times before.? We want a pilot who can fly the 747 on, well, autopi­lot.? We want a sur­geon who has done hun­dreds of the same oper­a­tion, and learned some­thing from each one, not a sur­geon who has done one hun­dred dif­fer­ent sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dures once.? As such, expe­ri­ence is really about tenure in a role, with rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence hav­ing a direct cor­re­la­tion to years in the role. ? In a high-variance sit­u­a­tion, where we are expect­ing an inno­v­a­tive out­come, but have lit­tle to no sense what the right answer might look like, we need a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of what “expe­ri­enced” means.? In this con­text, we want peo­ple who are expe­ri­enced with the process of inno­va­tion — in other words, peo­ple who have gone through the “under­stand — build — test” cycle of Prin­ci­ple 4 many times.? We want folks with a lot of mileage under their belt, in other words, but that mileage need not be strictly cor­re­lated with years at work.? For exam­ple, one of the rea­sons why Honda cycles its pro­duc­tion engi­neers through its var­i­ous rac­ing pro­grams is to increase their inno­va­tion process mileage; design­ing a new com­po­nent for a mass mar­ket auto­mo­bile takes sev­eral years, so between the time an engi­neer grad­u­ates col­lege and turns 40, they may have only shipped three to four designs to mar­ket (if they’re lucky).? Con­trast that with a race engi­neer, who faces the chal­lenge of opti­miz­ing a race car for a dif­fer­ent track con­fig­u­ra­tion every two weeks for eight months, as well as man­ag­ing an arc of inno­va­tion for the entire car over those same eight months.? Dur­ing that short period of time, they may expe­ri­ence 10, 15, even 20 cycles of “under­stand — build — test”.? So when it comes to pick­ing an engi­neer to go fig­ure out the future of mobil­ity, which one would you choose, the “I’ve shipped the same thing to mar­ket three times” per­son, or the “I’ve done 20 cycles every year for the past? four years” indi­vid­ual?? By my reck­on­ing, in this world an engi­neer age 26 could have 20 times the rel­e­vant process expe­ri­ence as a per­son 14 years their senior

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17: It’s not the years, it’s the mileage