Creative Selection vs Lean
Originally Posted: Friday, September 28, 2018 at 7:50AM
I recently finished a great book by Ken Kocienda called “Creative Selection”. In this book he describes how Apple creates software and insanely great products. This is the process they used to create the iPhone keyboard, Safari and the Mail text editor.
Just this week I went to an “Ignite bootcamp” at my place of work and learned “Lean” principals. These are a series processes used to create customer driven products used at Toyota. Lean seems to be the shiny new hammer that innovative enterprises (oxymoron ?) are using to drive change.
In Creative Selection Ken gives us an inside look into why Apple’s software process creates insanely great products. The kind of products people will wait in line for overnight. Below is a comparison between the principles Ken outlines in Creative Selection and Lean.
Creative Selection
Demo culture
Customer Empathy
Inspiration
Collaboration
Craft
Diligence
Decisiveness
Taste
Concrete artifacts
Lean
Fast experiments
Customer Empathy
Big Idea
Small Teams
Rapid Experimentation
Experiment Decision
MVPs
There are similarities between methodologies but there are some striking differences: mainly Craft and Taste. Lean has no place for these in the process. Apple includes them in every step of the process. This is one of the main reason people have such an emotional connection to these products.
Look at your iPhone. It feels great in your hand. It delights and surprises you with tasteful animation and well thought out software.
Look at your Toyota. It is reliable. It gets you from point A to point B. It is arguably a great value. But it lacks style and taste. It is the main reason I have not purchased a Toyota.
This is why customers are not standing in line for Toyotas and why Lean processes will never create an insanely great product. It will create a lot crappy products really fast and really cheap.
And no one will wait in line for a crappy product.