Paul McCartney and Subtle Signals: Applications to New Product Development

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Mark A Hart, NPDP

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Paul McCartney and Subtle Signals:Applications to New Product Development

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Requisites to Coordination

• Individually, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were proficient musicians

•As a group, the Beatles practiced together for years

•Musically, they knew what to expect

•They did not rely on a technology that they could not control

•They did not rely on delayed feedback from others

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Feed Forward

•Use information accumulated in the past to influence the future

•Benefits from the involvement of proficient practitioners

•Training precedes performance

•A control signal that is transmitted from a source to a destination

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Prominent Signal

• Discernible sounds such as the crash of a cymbal or the rumble from the bass drum

• Facial expressions of the other musicians including mouth movements

• Movements of fingers, arms, and feet of the other musicians

• Interactions with the environment such as instantaneous interaction of the performance and reactions from the crowd

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Subtle Signals• Crowd noise

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Feedback

•Uses information about current results to influence operation in the present

•Modifies a system based on interim results

•Changes the system output

•May be referred to as closed-loop feedback

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Judiciously Incorporating Subtle Signals

• Valuable subtle signals may not be available when they would be the most useful

• Valuable subtle signals may be overlooked by novices

• An individual musician may not have the capacity to discern valuable subtle signals from the spurious subtle signals

• The value of amplifying a particular signal by a specific amount is assessed by the nature of the results and the interaction with the environment

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Incorporating the appropriate subtle signals enabled the Beatles to be proficient performers in environments with nearly overwhelming undesirable noise.

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Coordinated Efforts of Camera Operators

•Camera operators were proficient individually

•They formed a cohesive team. •They framed every shot without being

able to hear the coordinating instructions from the director.

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MismatchThe differences of “our mental images/impressions and the reality it is supposed to represent”

(John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, 1992, 25)

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Impressions and Representation of Reality

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Impressions

•May be faulty or incomplete

• Impressions are built on assumptions

•Biases influence impressions

• Individual observations may be misleading

•Errors may be unknown.

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Representations of Reality are Influenced by:

•Observations•Feedback from decisions•Feedback from actions•Interactions with the environment

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Because representations of reality may be faulty or incomplete, approaches should be developed to detect and correct mismatches

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Address and Improve Mismatches

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OODA Loop Sketch adapted from Boyd’s “The Essence of Winning and Losing” 1995

Mismatches and the OODA Loop Sketch

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Rapid feedback and feed forward capabilities minimize the propagation of mistakes

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Proficient craftsman can incorporate selected subtle signals appropriately to achieve valuable results nearly instantaneously.

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Use of Mismatch Approaches

•Situations that include preparation, performance, and retrospective phases

•Situations with long delays between analysis, plans, actions, and consequences

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Contributions to Mismatches

•Prominent signals•Subtle signals•Noise •Interactions

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Applications to Development Experience

•Requisites to Coordination•Subtle signals•Feedback•Feed forward•Impressions•Representations of reality•Mismatches

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Recommendations

•Invest in opportunity areas such as theory and practice

•Learn to discern valuable subtle signals from the spurious

•Improve your agility so that you can learn faster than the speed of the market and faster than competitors

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Developing Winners: Assimilating the Insights Encapsulated in Boyd's OODA Loop

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www.Developing-Winners.com

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Paul McCartney and Subtle Signals:

Mark A Hart

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www.OpLaunch.com

Twitter: @OpLaunch

27 February 2014

Applications to New Product Development