Skip to main content

"Serious Play": experimentation by simulation

Michael Schrage wrote "Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate" to show that a company dominates its industry when it designs prototypes quickly and frequently, and when it uses its innovations to continually transform itself and its relationships with customers and suppliers. Microsoft, Boeing, Royal Dutch/Shell and Disney are masters of what Schrage calls "rapid prototyping."

Whether it's a spreadsheet that tests a new financial model or a foam prototype of a calculator, what interests Schrage is not the model itself, but the behavior that play--be it modeling, prototyping, or simulation--inspires. An organizational culture built around this kind of "serious play" is fundamental for encouraging innovation. Schrage argues that while prototypes and simulations are valuable in supporting an organization's existing behaviors, they're more valuable when they turn up surprises.

In the last chapter, Schrage lays out the 10 rules of serious play:


  1. Know who wins and who loses from an innovation.
  2. Decide what the main paybacks should be and measure them rigorously.
  3. Be willing to fail early and often.
  4. Manage a diversified prototype portfolio.
  5. Tightly-couple a prototype to the ultimate product.
  6. Design prototypes that invite play.
  7. Create markets around prototypes.
  8. Encourage role-playing, build a prototype that engages customers, vendors, and colleagues.
  9. Know when the costs outweigh the benefits.
  10. Record and review relentlessly and rigorously.


Buy "Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate" from Amazon.com.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

The importance of testing assumptions

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s talk from the TED conference last month was recently posted online. In the first 4.5 minutes of it, Ariely (who wrote the best-selling book Predictably Irrational ) addresses, through his own experience, a topic that is also quite relevant for innovators in an uncertain environment: the importance of testing assumptions through experiments.
Read more

Capital One: benchmark in experimentation based management

Capital One is a diversified financial services company offering a broad array of credit, savings and loan products to customers in the United States, UK, and Canada. It ranks #115 on the S&P 500 and #4 in Diversified Financials (BusinessWeek, 2005). Its stock has outperformed the S&P index since 1999. Founded by Richard Fairbank in 1988 based on his belief that the power of information, technology, testing and great people could be combined to bring highly customized financial products directly to consumers, Capital One has emerged as one of the America's largest consumer franchises with almost 50 million customer accounts and one of the nation's most recognized brands. In an interview for Fast Company Magazine Nigel Morris, Cap One’s president thus defined the reason behind their success: “Very few companies have the ability to test and learn.” Testing and learning form the foundation on which Capital One is built. The company tests every product offering, every proce...
Read more

Culture of experimentation and future of strategy

Tom Davenport posted on his Harvard Business School Publishing blog his view on the future of strategy. He stresses the importance of experimentation: A Culture of Experimentation and Learning A company focused on entrepreneurial execution would have a culture based on experimentation and learning, so that no major strategy or initiative is undertaken without extensive testing, the use of a control group, and other aspects of the scientific method. In this sort of culture, any particular strategy, process design, or performance metric is only a hypothesis about how the world works. It should be tested and confirmed on a small scale before proceeding to the large scale initiative. Capital One, for example, undertakes more than 60,000 experiments a year in credit card marketing and other financial offerings. Toyota is also known for its culture of experimentation and learning. Entrepreneurial execution is an effective compromise between the overly deterministic approach of strategic engi...
Read more