Hey There! While Peter had a few well-deserved days off, Moritz visited @DPZ_berlin for a highly inspiring breakfast briefing event on »Democratising the Knowledge Industry«. In this issue, he’ll share how this made him discover exciting analogies between working for societal change and our daily business.

In digital product development we’ve understood a long time ago: Even the most seasoned experts cannot reliably predict which solutions are going to work for your specific situation and which are not. The reasons for this are quite simple.

1. Every project comes with its very own context consisting of users, goals, stakeholders, organisational dynamics, history and countless other factors.
2. Everything in the digital world is in constant flux (technologies, devices, trends).

Based on that, most of what experts can do for projects is share their knowledge of which approaches have worked in the past and (ideally) some explanation of why they worked. This is surely helpful but only a tiny part of the process.

So it becomes obvious that tackling a new challenge with an empirical mindset and a chain of many small and user-focused experiments is far more promising than having a team of experts create a big concept and hope that it will lead to the desired outcome.

Whether you prefer to call the experimental approach Agile, Design Thinking or something else does not really matter much. What is actually quite interesting though, is how the described principle seems to not only hold true for working on products and devices in the digital realm but also for far bigger contexts. Such as societal change and innovation.

The event we mentioned earlier was connected to the presentation of a new report on democratising the knowledge economy. In a panel discussion, its authors – Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Nesta experts Madeleine Gabriel and Isaac Stanley – described their vision of a truly democratised knowledge economy that no longer concentrates power and influence in the hands of a few dominant players such as Google, Amazon and Apple.

Enabling more people and companies from all over the world to participate, they argued, could have a tremendous impact on reducing inequality and increasing productivity across the board. This would of course require rather disruptive changes to our current economic system.

They did not limit themselves to being visionary but painted a clear picture of how the vision could actually become reality – and this is where things became even more interesting. They made two significant points:

Aiming for a universally applicable approach is very unlikely to work. Rather, initiatives and measures need to incorporate national, regional or even local particularities and contexts. This basically means that we should expect (and aim for) a patchwork of custom solutions, not a single uniform pattern.

Big change comes in small steps. Many of them. When it comes to structural change, comprehensive masterplans are inefficient and likely to provoke fear and a lot of pushback. It is more promising to start with local, manageable experiments and then think about scaling up what works. For the best prospects of success, this decentralised approach should be supported by a common overall vision.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

My takeaway

Trying to create new digital products that are not just a slight improvement to what’s already on the market? Looking to bring about fundamental change in society? Whatever the topic or its extent, we should:

• aim for small, experimental steps over big leaps.
• aim for inclusion and collaboration over isolated expertise.

That’s it from me for today – but what about you? Hit reply to share your thoughts!

Till next time,
Moritz

PS: I’ve just started reading Michael Schrage’s book, The Innovator’s Hypothesis. It has the very telling subtitle »How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas« and received quite a bit of praise since being published in 2014. Stay tuned for updates.