S1 E11 | Unpacking the Word “New”

The iPhone was simply a new tool that was enabled by technology advancements for us to take all of those jobs and satisfy them through one device, as opposed to separate devices. So the jobs existed, but the change of a new product didn't change the jobs. It changed the solutions that were available to satisfy the jobs. So if you go back to like a pandemic, if I didn't work from home before, that doesn't mean that the desire to work from home did not exist before. It means it didn't exist for me. And when the pandemic hit and now my struggling moments have changed both from the supply side for corporations and from the demand side for the laborer. You end up saying, well, you know what, I gotta figure out how to work from home. I'm in this new set of struggling moments for me, but not that they didn't exist. They existed independently of me.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast, where we challenge the status quo of innovation and new product development. We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're joined by Greg Engel, who is my co founder and the chief. Bob Interpreter joined. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize and recharge your brain to build better products.

Hey, Bob, Today we're going to talk a little bit about some unpacking of words or statements and things like that that we always do at the office. We did a podcast, I think, that dropped a little bit ago, talking about how we argue a lot at the office.

We argue a lot.

So for this one, I want to introduce a new partner to argue with, Matt Shepard, who is a associate of ours at the Rewired group.

Yes.

And I went back and forth.

He's a principal as well.

I went back and forth on what to do for this podcast. And the first thing that popped in my head was I wanted to talk to Matt about economics, which is his background and jobs he done. But then something else popped into my head because we were talking about Matt's child going to college and having to write essays, and there was an interesting essay question. So I want to throw the essay question out to both you and Matt and I'll probably chime in as well, but I wanted to kind of debate this. This essay question. I'm going to paraphrase it. I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's a, it's a uppity college that puts us out and they like to do long winded things. So we're just going to kind of.

Cut to the chase.

Cut to the chase.

So you just ruined my son's chances of getting in there.

Oh, I did say your last name. We'll delete that. We'll delete that. It'll be fine.

So Mark Twain once said, there's no such thing as a new idea.

Yeah.

Let's start with you, Bob. What's your thought on that? When you hear that quote, what's your first gut reaction to that?

My first reaction is yes, that's true. Because everything's built on top of something else. Right. And there is a degree of change to something, but there's always a base foundation that everything is built on. And so they're all derivatives and they're sometimes taking things from one industry to another industry. So it seems like it's new, but it's been done before in some other place. There's all these honing and refinements. But the fact is that true innovation requires in some cases just a new perspective on something, but it's usually built from somewhere else. That's my first pass at that answer.

And Matt, do you have anything to add to that?

I agree with that. But I would say that new ideas, there's two differences really. The thing, the solution, is there a new solution? I mean, some people say the iPhone is a new solution. Right. And it's a new technology. It combined, you know, three or four or five different devices and put it into one platform. Right.

It had touch screen and had other things that were part of it. But at the same time it's, it's, it was all out there.

It was all out there. There were PDAs, there were computers, there were phones, there were cameras. And all of a sudden the technology advances allowed us to create a new version of those things that was a singular device. Right. So it's not truly a new idea, it's a new version of other ideas.

Well, and this is where we have to unpack. What's the word? New.

Yeah.

Where's the threshold of when is it not new and when is it, when is it new and then what is it? You know, an idea. So there's the two big words around it is an idea, a solution. And so part of this is to realize kind of like, you know, what's the context we're actually talking about? Are there any you know, there are no new ideas like in innovation. The fact is, a lot of times it's iteration more than it is innovation.

So why do you think people put so much emphasis on having new ideas or new things or being unique to the world? Why do we drive for that so much? Because you hear people say it all the time, right?

Yep.

What's the driver behind that?

I think part of it is one ownership, uniqueness. The whole notion of the patent office and that I have a patent for something that's a unique idea. They're the judgers of basically is this unique or not or is it protectable? And then ultimately it has to go back to economics. And so a lot of times people are looking for something new, meaning it has to be defendable and it has to be different enough from everybody else that we can stick out.

Yeah, I agree. Actually I agree with that 100%. And the way that it manifests is not only in things, but for example, language is a huge problem in this regard. In economics, we define things certain ways using specialized language. And we use that specialized language because it makes us unique. It gives us a way to control knowledge, a way to separate ourselves and portray ourselves as something new. Accounting does the same thing. You know, any specialized, specialized industry, you uses language to create the perception of new and unique so that they can satisfy their own egos and so that they can maximize their potential for building wealth. But at the end of the day, and I've said this before, and all those accountants out there are going to hate me for this, but accounting is nothing but basic arithmetic with a few specialized definitions.

But here's the thing, is that I think that most people in innovation spend more time on trying to make it unique and new than actually serving customers to make it better.

Agreed.

And so what happens is it's almost like if I make it better, people will buy more. That's not true.

Correct.

Right. The other part is if I make it unique and different people will buy it, that's not true. And so part of this is to realize in a lot of cases, people weren't going out to make something new and different. They were going after solving a specific struggling moment in people's lives. And when they focus on the problem, it causes them to actually create, if you will, new things, but from different perspectives.

Do you think people are actually going into looking for the struggle or do you think that's actually a happy accident?

So what I would say is that there's a separation between the two. Some people go and try to create the new, we've got to go find the new chip, we got to go find the new sneaker, we got to go find the new. And part of this is to realize, like, at some point, people just don't need more chips. At some point they're like, at some point they're struggling or wrestling with something that causes you to create sun chips. And so all of those things is that the successful innovators understand that it's built on a backbone of years, centuries of knowledge and technology. And at the same time, the fact is, today proposes basically a new way possibly to do something. But the fact is it's all on the backbone of what's been already invented.

So I think what I heard both of you say to a certain degree is we have to say it's new to get attention.

Yes. If I say it's the same, you'll get attention.

To get attention and to create value.

For ourselves, the company or ourselves.

So is the concept of me creating a new idea, is that kind of what we would call supply side thinking?

Yeah, that's where it falls. And so there's a difference between what I call technology and basically ideas. Ideas are almost, I think of ideas as free. There's like, everybody has an idea. We can actually, if we sit in a room and brainstorm, everybody can come up with a hundred ideas about anything. But what are good ideas and what are ideas that actually resonate? And what ideas turn into creating value or helping people? And you start to realize, like, you've got to bounce those ideas against the right things. And when you bounce it against the wall of new and unique and different, the that's not necessarily going to turn into those things.

So I want to push on something you just said, though, and Matt can jump in here as well. But the concept of ideas being free, I think is a flawed concept.

Okay.

Because it takes time, effort and money to create an idea.

Yes.

Especially if we're talking about companies.

Well, again, if we unpack what idea is, there's a difference between like, I had a thought about something and what a true mechanism is. And that mechanism is not necessarily an idea to me.

So. But when Mark Twain says there's no new ideas, he's talking about something that's probably thought of not just a spark in someone's mind, it's something that someone actually tried to go do.

Yep.

And what I'm saying is I don't think. I think people actually default to that thinking of ideas are free because then we can take someone else's idea. We can do different things with them. But if we actually think about how much money companies take or spend, I should say to come up with an idea, to say they're free is actually to discount the most important thing of formulating.

I agree.

So here's the thing. I will retract. I think that most people think ideas are easy and free, and the fact is they're not.

They are not.

I totally agree with that side of it. But the way that, that when we're talking to people about it, it's like, well, you know, we can just get, you know, 20 people in the room and brainstorm a bunch of ideas, and out of it, we can actually do a filter process and do this and synthesis and all this other stuff, and you end up with like, okay, but is it really relevant? Is it really.

And those are the most expensive ideas.

Exactly. Those are usually the most expensive ideas because they. They don't really go that far or they end up. I would say they're. They're great in the mind, but in practice, don't execute very much so.

Very much so.

All right, so I think we all kind of agree that there's no new ideas out there. There's combinations of things. There's new product, there's new developments, there's.

New things, but there's rules of new. There's like, if I get a patent, it's basically saying I have a new method or a new way or a new knowledge that basically nobody else can have access to. And so there is a judge of new. But the fact is, most. They're judging it. Is it really different from anybody else's? And so there's. There's a way in which to say it's. It's new, but it's just. They're all derivatives of something, for sure.

Okay, so that's gonna be very confusing to people because you just said it was new. There's new, but then you said there's not new. So that's going to be very confusing to people. So.

No, there's a. I said there's a judge of new.

Yeah, there's an arbiter. There's an arbiter that says something.

So that's the important thing for people to understand, though, Right, Is. Is what we're talking about is the concept of thinking or ideas. And what we're saying is they're all derivatives off of something. Yes, but then in the marketplace, there's a judgment of new.

Yes.

And that could be judged by many different people. But the thought of new thought, people are usually building upon, but we still want people. People build upon other people's thought, people build up other people's ideas, and then we come up with different ways to deliver on those solutions. Right.

I mean, so I'll take, I'll take. I'll take the book that you and I wrote on demand side Sales. Right. Is it new? I don't believe that it's new, but the fact is, is that people are calling it new because. Or refreshing and new because at some point in time, it's not talking about the sales funnel, it's talking about the buying process. And it's taking jobs to be done, which we've been doing for 30 years. And we just flipped it into that realm. And all of a sudden it's seen as new and unique and innovative. And my thing is, it's like that doesn't fit my definition of it. It's just an application of the technology that we have in a different space.

Well, it's new as a word people use to describe something that they haven't experienced or a different way to look at it.

That's right.

And what we're talking about is actually new ideas. So let's do that a little bit. Let's talk about Jaws. You'd done all right. And it was a brand new idea, right? You. You started interviewing people. It was brand new, right?

No.

You thought of it, right?

No.

No, you didn't?

No.

Where did it come from?

It's a whole bunch. One, it was born from the struggle of not being able to understand what people were saying and what they meant. But with the either the need state study I got or the usage and attitude study, like I don't understand how that helps me get to what I need to go build. And so that gap basically said, all right, well how do I figure this out? And so ultimately it was usage and attitudes is about basically how people think and feel about stuff and what they do, but not why they do it. And need states is more about the context and kind of the criteria around why people do what they do. But it's the merging of all that that end up coming to jobs, which was, you know, I go back to the five W's and two H's. Who, what, when, where, why, how and how much. Right. Well, this is who, when, where, and why. Is that to help me then figure out what to go build?

Okay, but what, what methodologies or thoughts or work of other people's did you borrow or flip or use in different ways to help you build jobs?

We done So I think. I think it was looking at things like need states and realizing like, okay, that, that. That gets me some distance, but not all the way. It's how usage and attitude kind of started, but it like it still was flat. And then integrating it together and then to be honest, bringing some of Taguchi's notion of functions into it. Right? And being able to understand the. How the function of something, what it does as opposed to what it doesn't do. Because a lot of times people will just tell you what they don't want, not what they want, all the problems. And then it was that whole notion of reference point. And when I say contrast to create meaning, which is that aspect of like, where are people actually coming from when they say these words? And so ultimately it's being able to understand. It's a merging of, you will, some engineering principles, some marketing principles, and human psychology.

So what about Dr. Deming? What did his. What did your experience working with him or his thoughts or his ideas, how does that go into Jobs?

Right, so. So everything is a system, right? And everything has inputs and outputs and basically customers and outcomes and all of that actually strung together. The way in which to say, like, I understand how to build the system, but I don't know why I'm. Who I'm building it for, or if I do, why do they actually need it? And so ultimately Deming's whole causal structure and understanding that aspect of it and realizing that the system is our responsibility to design and that ultimately how our system is aimed and what it does is a function of our abilities to put it together. And so to me, I need to become very, very clear, to be honest. It's the birth of what I would call right to left thinking. I need to think about the outcomes I'm really trying to achieve. I'm really trying to actually understand the progress I'm trying to help people make.

And.

And then what systems can I actually do to go do that? And so that's all part of the knowledge that Jobs is built on as well.

So it wasn't something brand new that was just birthed. You realize that you took different learnings from your schooling or from mentors that you had. And there's mentors that we didn't mention that will be in a book that you're writing called the Learning to Build that. We'll talk about some other mentors and how they've influenced that as well. But what I wanted people to understand is even something like Jobs, that's new to a lot of people because they didn't know it was there. It was born of other ideas. You put them together based on your struggling moment of being an engineer and having to build something and not being able to figure it out with what was given to you.

Not knowing what easy was or fun was and how to actually engineer it was really. That's the struggling moment where I could see their usage and attitudes, I could see their Personas, I, I could get all that. But it's like I didn't understand, like, why now? Why today? What's happening?

So, Matt, you thought you were, you were getting out of this scot free, and I'm going to turn the barrel to you now and talk to you a little bit from another concept of people saying, well, the pandemic, economic crisis creates new jobs. So that's a new idea. Right?

New jobs.

New jobs. A new idea. Right.

That new jobs exist because of some, you know, unforeseen trauma.

Yeah, a pandemic or whatever, it creates a new thing, a new struggle, a.

New may create new struggling moments. It doesn't create or define necessarily new jobs.

And here's the. Let me just hop in because I think the point is it might be a new job for me because I haven't been in this struggling moment before, but that struggling moment actually exists for other people in a different place. And so it depends on the reference point of the word new. Is it a new job for whom and when? And when. And it's a question is like what I would say is the pandemic has caused people to more head into, for example, the job of, you know, build my, Help me work from home. There are a lot of people who work from home before, but all of a sudden the job of actually when I can't go into the office and I need to be able to be productive, help me find a place in my house so I can do that. It's just there were more people there because they had to be.

They had not been in that job before. But the job existed, the job existed.

In the universe in other ways. And so that's why when we do interviews, we look back to say, let's see what caused people to do that. Because we can see an inkling of kind of what's there. And then as we start to aim that forward, we have all the underlying, what we'd say, causal mechanisms that let us see who's headed to what direction and why they're going to choose.

So I think I have to get Catherine's air horn out because this was meant For Matt to answer these questions. But, you know, that's fine. Stuff happens at rewired, right?

It's perfectly fine. This is what happens at rewired all the time.

This is our thing.

This is debate. This is our debate.

I can't, you know, so I want.

To ask him to leave the room.

I want to slow all that down a little bit because there are many people out there saying that the pandemic, or economic crisis, if we have one, we'll change the jobs. And I just. Matt, just give a more succinct round answer so we can go to the next question.

I'll try. I'm not sure that I can, but I'll try. So if you look, for example, at the iPhone, again, right, the jobs that the iPhone satisfies, those jobs existed before, but they were not satisfied by a device that could do all of them together. So the desire to have access to my calendar while I'm on the road, which is not truly the job, but it's a part of the job, existed. The desire to be able to make phone calls while I was out of the office and not near my landline, the desire to have access to my email and other things that I might be able to use my computer for, all of those jobs existed prior to the development of the iPhone. The iPhone was simply a new tool that was enabled by technology advancements for us to take all of those jobs and satisfy them through one device as opposed to separate devices. So the jobs existed, but the change of a new product didn't change the jobs. It changed the solutions that were available.

To satisfy the jobs and the expectations.

Exactly. And so if you go back to, like, a pandemic, right, to Bob's point, if I didn't work from home before, that doesn't mean that the desire to work from home did not exist before. It means it didn't exist for me. And when the pandemic hit, and now my struggling moments have changed both from the supply side for corporations and from the demand side for the laborer. You end up saying, well, you know what? I gotta figure out how to work from home. I'm in this new set of struggling moments for me. But not that they didn't exist. They existed independently of me.

But even in that example, me wanting to get work done regardless of where I am doesn't change.

Correct?

That's right.

The location changed. The job may or may not have changed for them.

Yes. And if you were to go to, like, the jobs that say working from.

Home is not a job, and that's what people think. Working from home is a job, but working from home is not the job.

No, that's a channel where I do my work.

Correct?

Yeah, that's a different discussion. We don't want to go into that.

But that, but that's what people are. That's what I think people get confused with is they, they say, well, people went to work from home, so that's a new job to be done. Working from home is a job to be done. No, it's still being productive. It's still being, not being seen as somebody that's, that's not doing the right things. It's still all those different things that add up to a job to be done.

Because a job, as we've said many times, and people fail to view jobs in a holistic manner. And by holistic I mean that they understand all of the elements of a job. The struggling moments, the pushes, the pulls, the anxieties, the habits, the trade offs, the hiring and firing criteria, et cetera, in addition to the different functional, social and emotional requirements. That is the holistic view of a job. So when I state a functional statement like, oh, I need to work from home, that's not a job, that's all part of a job. Right. And so this is where the shorthanding of what jobs are leads us down these primrose paths of thinking. We have multiple jobs multiple times. And I'll give you another example of how the pandemic didn't actually change jobs. You know, my child last year was a junior in high school and he went from going to school and taking classes in a classroom with his classmates, with teachers, to on March 13, taking classes at home by himself, virtually on a computer. What I hired the school to provide to my child did not change because of the pandemic. The way in which the school delivered it changed. But what I'm asking for the school to provide to my child and me as a parent didn't change at all. I'm still expecting them to educate him to some level, to help him graduate from school, to help him get good standardized test scores, and to ultimately be able to matriculate to college. Right. And so my desired for what the school is supposed to deliver didn't change at all. How they delivered it changed.

And ultimately then had you start to think about alternatives.

Right. Do I have to consider a different school? Do I have to find. Because maybe the school he's currently going to is not doing a good job of delivering the, the information via a virtual channel.

Yeah. So. So that brings me to the next question is what often people will say is, well, the reason why I think it creates new jobs is because during an economic downturn or during a pandemic, I can see churn or I can see businesses grow. So that has to be an indicator that a new job is born.

No, it's a new way of delivering against the same set of jobs or in churn.

It's just that my current isn't working and I may or might have changed jobs.

Absolutely.

I may or may not have changed the job to be done, but that solution no longer works. I'm going to look for a new one.

It's the same as when you talk about you're trying to clean your windows and you're promised a streak, free clean, and then all of a sudden it starts streaking your job for cleaning the windows didn't change. But the solution is not working anymore, though it disinfects. It probably does.

But it streaks.

But it streaks. You know, there's a trade off.

There's a trade off.

So I think that kind of wraps up kind of what we're talking about. And I'm hoping this gives you a little bit of example of how we work and the banter we have and kind of the arguments we have. And it started off as, you could tell, it started off as everybody agreeing, but then when you start digging into words, you start understanding there could be confusion in those words. So again, the homework or the thing that we want you to think about as you leave this podcast and you go about your week is, are there times that you're talking to somebody and the word isn't unpacked enough? Like, new idea wasn't unpacked enough? And we agreed on the superficial level, but then when we started really digging into it, we found holes into what we were really saying. So I want you to think of conversations that, that you have with people, and then you can tell where the disconnects are once you kind of unpack that conversation. But the real goal is to unpack during the conversation so both people walk away with clear understanding instead of walking away with the thought we were clear and then two weeks later realizing, oh, we were way off. Right. So take that time to unpack during your conversation. Hopefully we showed you some of that. And also take time to do a debrief or a postmortem on the conversation when something doesn't work to find out what you didn't unpack.

Yep.

Have a great rest of your week and look forward to seeing you soon.

Thanks for listening to the Circuit Breaker podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you won't miss an episode. If you know somebody who's stuck on the Innovation Treadmill, please share it. If you'd like to learn more information, visit us@the RewiredGroup.com to find out how we work, how we can help. Some resources, some books, some software. Join us next time as we trip the Circuit Breaker to help you recharge, reenergize and refocus your new product development.