Pointing and calling. Building product strategy habits.
Try this: when you leave the house, see what you need to pick up and say out loud, I’ve got my case, my coat, my coffee, my keys, my lunch, my kids…
By calling it out, you’re giving yourself the chance to notice what’s missing: wallet, computer, water bottle, dog…
This habit starts to build a picture of what’s normal and expected. It helps avoid mistakes.
Pointing and calling is a method that is used in some unusual places. Stand on a railway station in Japan and you’ll see station staff walking up and down the platform pointing at things and calling them out: signs are red, doors closed, platform edge.
Action follows.
By doing all this while the train is stationary, they are noting the normal. When something unexpected happens, they see that too and they call it out. Action follows. If a door is open, it gets noticed before the train moves, and gets closed before a more serious incident can develop.
These actions become habit. Habits build into an unconscious awareness of the station staff’s surroundings and staff become attuned to changes in the air. They are expert in their tasks and they know when the picture looks wrong.
room44 adopts the same approach to your business.
We immerse ourselves in your world for two reasons: to see it the way you see it, and to see it the way you don’t – in other words, the way everybody else does.
Doing this – pointing and calling out what we see, taking a view of the broader environment – competitor activity, emerging technology, flagged consumer behaviour – helps to call out the non-standard. It’s a simple, but powerful, way of seeing things as they are and as they aren’t. This is where the opportunities for possible products hide.
Get us to run a design sprint or an innovation audit, and you’ll see how quickly your colleagues pick this up, and how they develop the habit of noticing the normal and the non-standard.
The compound effect of pointing and calling.
Little habit changes, practised every day, turn into major changes over time. Eat a piece of cake a day, or an apple, and see what happens. To form a habit takes commitment. It takes resolve, and it requires you to prioritise this new action so that it happens regularly – a bit like a habit. In fact, exactly like a habit.
This is how we start. Take the first step to a new habit. [button link=”https://meetings.hubspot.com/tristan28″ type=”big” newwindow=”yes”] Click here to book time to talk[/button]
Seeing it differently. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.