Ingersoll-Rand is a giant company that makes dreary products such as industrial grinders, used in auto-shops to sand down auto bodies. Historically, Ingersoll-Rand has been slow a bringing new products to market, with an average four-year product introduction cycle. The company decided to to something about the slow development cycle. It created a project team whose goal was to produce a new grinder in a year - one quarter the usual time. This team did a lot of things right in this direction, including the use of stories to emphasize the group's new attitude and culture. One story, for instance, involved a critical decision about whether to build the new grinder's casing out of plastic or metal. Plastic would be more comfortable for the customer, but would it hold up as well as metal?
The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conducted protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the Grinder Team. They were supposed to act quickly. A few members of the team cooked up a less formal testing procedure. While on an off-site customer visit, the team members tied a sample of each material to the back bumper of their rental car, then drove around the parking lot with the materials dragging behind. They kept this until the police came and told them to knock it off. The verdict was that the new plastic composit held up just as well as the traditional metal. Decision made.
This story became known as the Drag Test and worked to reinforce the team's new culture. The assumption was that they still needed data to make decisions. But they needed to do it a lot quicker.
The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conducted protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the Grinder Team. They were supposed to act quickly. A few members of the team cooked up a less formal testing procedure. While on an off-site customer visit, the team members tied a sample of each material to the back bumper of their rental car, then drove around the parking lot with the materials dragging behind. They kept this until the police came and told them to knock it off. The verdict was that the new plastic composit held up just as well as the traditional metal. Decision made.
This story became known as the Drag Test and worked to reinforce the team's new culture. The assumption was that they still needed data to make decisions. But they needed to do it a lot quicker.