Smart little people and service design

Imagine you have to design a computer from scratch.

Now imagine that computers haven't existed up until that point, so nobody has any idea what a motherboard or a processor is. How would you go about designing such a thing?

People are designing new things all the time - products, services, jobs, laws....so they must experience similar difficulties. Fortunately there's a tool which can help them.

Smart Little People is used predominately by engineers to tackle technical problems, but it's equally applicable to other forms of design. One way to approach the computer design problem (at least at a conceptual level) is to let smart little people take the place of the components. A smart little person is basically a super intelligent human being which can do anything you tell it to. This allows you to escape the trappings of considering 'is this technically feasible?' If we consider the main functions of a computer to be accepting information from a user, sending it to a CPU, accessing memory, outputting information to the screen, and running system maintenance programs, then this can easily be tackled with the smart little people approach. We don't care whether the computer uses a keyboard, or a mouse, or any other form of input device - we just let a smart little person take care of it. Likewise, we don't care whether the CPU is multi-threaded, multi-core, RISC, or whatever - again, a smart little person can take care of it. We follow a similar approach for each component of the system.

The beauty of this approach is that it allows us to pose questions in a non-technical way. A marketing person could say 'well, why don't we have another smart little person who communicates with all the other computers?' In traditional technical language, the marketing person would be disadvantaged, and may feel nervous about offering suggestions. With smart little people this is no longer a problem.

Once all the smart little people have been identified, then the technical people can get to work making them feasible, content that management understands what they're working on.

Smart little people is even more powerful when we're designing services. Let's say we're designing amazon.com. Smart little people can be envisaged in the following roles: taking orders, processing payment, getting the item from stores, sending it out, restocking etc. I can decide which smart little people to replace with technology, and which to keep as real human beings. Over time I'm likely to use more and more technology - but this isn't the overall aim of a business. Businesses exist to make money, and in an increasingly competitive environment, those businesses need to be launched quickly.

A lot of start ups don't have the money to have the best technical systems, but they do have smart people who work hard. I think it's important to identify the elements which must use technology, and those which can be done by people. This is the first step to launching a service as quickly as possible. I've seen a lot of start ups develop massively complex technical systems, and go bust before even launching. Or even if they manage to launch, the technology might not be flexible enough to handle the variety of customer requests, which is so characteristic of service businesses.

My main message is for non-technical people to take heart. Focus on the customer, and don't get too worried about technology - you'll have plenty of time to develop the right systems. Keep smart and launch quickly.