Which approach to new product development will produce better results? Reductionism or Recursion?

Reductionism

According to Wikipedia:

“Reductionism is a philosophical position which holds that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.”

In new product development, reductionism is rationalized as breaking development tasks into manageable pieces. Typical artifacts are seen in organizational charts or the roles assigned to individuals. For example:

Coders or Testers

Designers or Developers

Marketers or Sales

Project Managers or Product Managers

Front End of Innovation or Development

One of the potential advantages of reductionism is that it may provide focus to specialty efforts. Another potential advantage is that is may facilitate the interchangeability of resources (for example, one tester can be replaced by another tester with the equivalent qualifications).

Potential disadvantages of reductionism approaches include:

Degrades communication across functional groups

Acceptance of a hand-off mentality. This occurs when one functional area ‘finishes their job’ and presents their deliverables to the next group.

Increases the amount of explicit documentation

Sub-optimization. Too much effort may be devoted to certain tasks while others items do not receive sufficient attention.

Too much emphasis attributed to reaching milestones. Not enough emphasis on value creation.

Recursion

Recursion involves solving problems of the same form. In new product development, typical primary problems include:

Solving a customer’s problem. This is also described as providing a solution for the job the customer is trying to accomplish.

Increasing the organization’s revenue and/or profits

Positioning the organization for success in the future

Increasing the motivation of the development network. Dan Pink described this using the qualities of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. I describe this as improving the Development Experience [DX]

Recursion in the Development Network

For a recursion approach to flourish, an individual relates their short-term efforts (such as hourly, daily, or weekly efforts) to solve one or more of the primary problems listed in the previous section. For example:

Are their current efforts improving the ability of a customer to solve their problem? Has the learning increased so that individual contributors can determine if they are closer to solving the customer’s problem today than they were yesterday?

Are these efforts valuable to the customer? Are these efforts too bureaucratic?

Will the development efforts for the next project produce better results than the current project? Are the development capabilities being enhanced for future projects?

Will the contributors to the development network feel a sense of accomplishment? Will the predominant feelings relate to burn-out and frustration?

An environment that enables recursion to flourish ensures that individuals embrace opportunities to contribute to value creation during the current project and future projects.

Alistair Cockburn described this type of approach as a series of cooperative games. He stated:

“Software development is a series of resource-limited, goal-directed cooperative games of invention and communication. The primary goal of each game is the production and deployment of a software system; the residue of the game is a set of markers to assist the players of the next game. People use markers and props to remind, inspire and inform each other in getting to the next move in the game. The next game is an alteration of the system or the creation of a neighboring system. Each game therefore has as a secondary goal to create an advantageous position for the next game. Since each game is resource-limited, the primary and secondary goals compete for resources.”

Clinton Keith described it this way:

“For a cross-discipline team th[...]

Individuals expect stressful portions of their new product development projects. An abundance of complaints may be a precursor to an abundance of stress. Individuals expect to have sufficient resiliency to cope with the stress. Even when exhausted, individuals expect to recover in time to keep their commitments to the next project. Individuals expect to survive.

There is a potential for something more positive than survival. This post explores the potential for growth.

The Negative Aspects of Stress

During new product development, stress is one of the costs of participation. Because of stress, some individual contributors deliver sub-standard work.

According to Chet Richards, “John Boyd thought of stress as an offensive weapon.” Richards references Boyd’s words to define stress. Boyd stated:

“Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse. “ (Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, 1986 #132)

For challenging projects, some individuals may feel overwhelmed. Because of their perceptions of the effort required for project success, individuals may risk “burning out.”

For problematic projects, phrases such as “death march” may be used to describe the development experience. According to Wikipedia

“Death March: In project management, a death march is any of several types of pathologic projects involving a dysphemistic, dark-humor analogy to real death marches, such as being gruelingly overworked, and (often and most especially) being gruelingly overworked for ill-founded reasons on a project that is obviously at high risk of bad outcome (i.e., project failure, and possibly threat of personal and group reputation damage). “

To understand the impacts of stress, I will highlight two items from current studies in psychology, posttraumatic stress and posttraumatic growth.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Stress may do more than reduce performance or produce other short-term harmful impacts. Consider the definition of posttraumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

According to Wikipedia:

“Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to any event that results in psychological trauma… Posttraumatic stress disorder is classified as an anxiety disorder, characterized by aversive anxiety-related experiences, behaviors, and physiological responses that develop after exposure to a psychologically traumatic event (sometimes months after). Its features persist for longer than 30 days, which distinguishes it from the briefer acute stress disorder and are disruptive to all aspects of life.”

Posttraumatic Growth (PTG)

Something good can emerge from bad situations. In some instances, growth can result from a stressful experience. Psychologists use the phrase Posttraumatic Growth. The phrase Posttraumatic Growth was coined by Richard Tedeshi, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

Posttraumatic growth is not the same as resilience. Resilience is assessed by one’s ability to return to pre-trauma levels. Posttraumatic growth is characterized by achieving higher levels of functionality than pre-trauma levels.

According to Wikipedia:

“Post-traumatic Growth refers to positive psychological change experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances. These sets of circumstances represent significant challenges to the adaptive resources of the individual, and pose significant challenges to individuals’ way of understanding the world and their place in it. Posttraumatic growth is not simply a return to baseline from a period of suffering; instead it is an experience of improvement that for some persons is deeply meaningful.”

Tedeschi and Calhoun (1) proposed a Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) comprised of five factors:

Relating to others

New possibilities

Personal strength

Spiritual change

Appreciation of life

An online inventory tool is available from the American [...]

A devastating zero model can guide your actions when deficiencies are discovered in projects. This concept may help you recover from new product development problems.

 Suddenly aware

In one of my current projects, I had the impression that everything was satisfactory. The objectives were clear. We had support from the highest levels of management. It seemed that many of the individual contributors were engaged and working in a cohesive and harmonious manner, Then, I learned of one exception. There was a potential problem related to the promotional effort for the product.

In a communication with the project sponsor, I wrote that I had just learned of a potential problem and that I had requested more information.

In addition, I wrote the phrase “I am not involved with promotional efforts.”

It was then that I realized the cause of my mistake. An excuse of “not being involved” is inadequate.

When I became aware of the potential problem, my first tendency was to assign blame and demand accountability.

Fortunately, my thoughts shifted to options for recovery.

Two analysis perspectives

During my analysis, I discovered that I could improve my understanding of the situation using a mathematical model that I am proposing for new product development.

Typically, mathematical models associated with new product development projects are associated with financial results such as the return on investment (ROI) or total sales or relative growth. These types of analyses predict post-launch results.

Another type of mathematical model can be associated with development. It requires a pre-launch perspective.

Typically, mathematical models associated with new product development projects are associated with financial results such as the return on investment (ROI) or total sales or relative growth. These types of analyses are done post-launch.Another type of mathematical model can be associated with development. It requires a pre-launch perspective.

Forecasting success

Prior to launch, there are many approaches to forecasting new product development success. Factors that may be used to predict success may include perceived qualities related to the following:

Initial concept

Refined concept (which is also known as a pivot)

Business model

Process

Management

Individual contributors

Competition

The perceptions impact project decisions (such as go / kill / wait), project portfolio decisions, and business development decisions.

Development equations

Consider the following simplified equations that contain factors A to Z that contribute to the project value.

Value = f[A + B + C + … + X + Y + Z]

Value = f[A x B x C x … x X x Y x Z]

Examples of factors A to Z may include the contributions from individuals assigned to roles in functional groups such as engineering, testing, marketing, advertising, promotional efforts, and commercialization.

In the first equation, the hypothesis is that the contribution from one set of individuals adds to the value created by other individuals. Efforts are additive.

In the second equation, the same factors exist but the contribution factors are multiplied.

Implications

To determine which equation might provide better insights, I asked “What are the implications when the factor associated with ‘promotional efforts’ = 0 ?”

In the first equation, there will be a minor impact on the final value. In the second equation, when the promotional efforts factor has a value of zero, the total value will be zero.

The mistake I made

I realized that our project had system-level problems. The feedback regarding the promotional efforts was inadequate because the feedback was delayed. The lack of progress on promotional efforts was not sufficiently transparent.

I was in this situation because we out-sourced promotional efforts. We out-sourced promotional efforts because of precedents from prior projects.

In the next few hours, the seriousness of the problem became clearer. The project sponsor was furious. The sponsor signaled that t[...]