Optimizing the Walk, not the Plan

Optimizing the Walk, not the Plan

Summary: I’ve been preparing the relaunch of my design business, and have realized that the way I’m doing it may not be suited to my “natural strengths” (now that I have an inkling of what they are).

If this is the case, I need to think of optimal action as applying the skills I have WITHOUT planning, trusting that I have the training to do it right. If firefighters act this way, perhaps I can learn from their example. And this suggests a radical plan of action.

I’ve been quiet lately, and that’s because I’ve been getting my ducks in a row to restart some kind of “design business”, though it might be more accurate to say that I’m just getting serious about doing it right.

To recap: Freelancing was never really the means to an end for me, but it has afforded me the chance to figure out what’s important to me. In hindsight, this freedom was also a tremendous luxury that I paid for with credit cards, missed career opportunities, isolation, and an uncertain future. However, I’ve also accumulated a giant pile of software, gear, and skills that will come in handy for this next phase of development. The recent diagram of my master vantage point is the culmination of this thinking, itemizing my so-called Five Destinations that are likely engines for future growth:

  • The Niche Design Business
  • Physical Goods (Books and Published Works)
  • Electronic Media, Software, and Online Tools
  • Community, Local Arts and Crafts, Blogs, and Guilds
  • “Professional Sounding Board”

Last week I started to lay out what the Niche Design Business might look like. I ended up drawing a kind of small store, which for me is imbued with the notion of tangible goods in a community context:

Design Niche What’s interesting about this diagram is that I seem to be honing in on something smaller scale. Up to this point, my past “business” could be characterized as a collection of odd jobs that happened to fall into my lap. Most went well, some did not. I’m thinking that now it’s time to apply the lessons I’ve learned in the construction of a compact, man-portable design business that converts “what I like” into sustainable benefit for me and the people I’m working with. But I don’t want to pursue a typical service model with the eventual goal of becoming a large agency. The feeling I want to create is more like that of having a a fantastic lawnmower, one with a tidy engine layout, great ergonomics, and an eagerness to cut grass extremely well, in ways I never imagined possible. In other words, I think I’m gravitating toward a limited application of my skills to create a design business that suits me. I’m not trying to be a “full-service agency” that does it all; rather, I’d like to make very simple focused applications in my little shop. That’s the niche.

Still, this is not the plan. This is another visualization, and I am finding myself spinning my wheels regarding the DETAILED BUSINESS PLAN. Any business plan worth its salt covers just a few basics:

  • The Money-Making Proposition – So, how do you think you will convince people to give you money? What do they get for your money?
  • The Estimated Revenue Stream – So you think you have a way to part people from their money. How much money, over what length of time, from whom? Make your best guess, and show your work.
  • The Costs of Building the Proposition – What’s it going to cost to build the engine, infrastructure, support team, and whatever else you need to make that money-making idea work.
  • Managing the Cash Flow – How are you going to ensure you survive the startup phase?
  • Hedging your Bets, Changing the Odds, Secret Weapons – What else are you going to do to manage your risk? Who do you have on the team that makes success more likely than not?

And this is where I’ve been stuck, at the money-making proposition. Just what AM I selling? What is it WORTH? And WHO is going to BUY it?

I am making this much harder for myself because I’m trying to identify just what kind of design I do, and what kind of work I want to do. By extension, I am trying to define WHO I AM so I can create a design business that fits me; this is much more likely to be a suitable (and therefore sustainable) niche design busines where I can be competitive. To borrow an idea from the recent Marty Neumeier DVD The Innovation Workshop, I want to make a statement like, “David Seah is the only designer that does XXXXXXX”. Because that’s who I am, and I don’t feel good about doing it any other way. There is, surprisingly, a market for that. Whether it is large or small, whether there are compromises I have to make, whether I can make a living doing whatever it is I think I want to do is, frustratingly, a completely open question.

And there’s where I left off three days ago, as I pondered my “only designer that does XXXXXXX” statement. Originally, I was planning to plod ahead and write a series of articles about each of the Five Destinations, this being the one about “The Niche Design Business”, but since then I’ve had several realizations:

  1. In yesterday’s Recycled Content Saturday post, I mentioned this ability I have to create stories out of very thin air by drawing upon my own associations and memories; this actually might be an unusual skill. And as I pondered this, a scene from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came to mind. It’s the one when Sundance is called on to show that he can competently shoot a gun. Sundance, who we all know by now is an amazing gunslinger, takes careful aim at a soup can a few paces away and completely misses. He tries again, with the same result. But Sundance says that this is not the way he shoots; he needs to “move a little”. And with that, he draws with blazing speed, peppering the with shot after shot using his intuitive method. He’s just not the “stand, aim, and fire” kind of shooter, and Sundance knew it. I could make the analogy that my story-writing process is similar, and it’s this kind of thinking that enables me to quickly outline project plans and write proposals. However, I’ve always assumed that after the plan is written, the methodical process should follow: pick the next step, establish a time frame, aim, execute, and measure. But you know what? Maybe that’s not my execution style at all. For the past 20 years I’ve tried to train myself into that mode of thinking, with some success, but every single time I’ve done something interesting it’s been from the hip or from the heart. I’ve got to move a little.
  2. I think it was in Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness that I read how firefighters rapidly make decisions in critical situations. There was a study on decision-making going on, and the researchers were investigating the hypothesis that firefighters perhaps made two choices very quickly, compared them, and then picked the best one. As it turns out, firefighters didn’t choose at all; they went with the first plan that came to mind after running it through a simple checklist of known dangers. This is possible, I conjecture, because they have the training, conditioning, and physical ability to execute such plans; there’s no need to question what is “the best option” in that scenario, so long as the checklist ensures that the firefighters are not pushing past the limits of their ability envelope.

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p>Now, I find myself in the position of choosing what I need to do to ensure that I am making money and making progress toward some kind of satisfying life goal. I have been assuming that I need to make the optimal choice, and my past activity for the past few weeks has been almost entirely oriented toward choosing the best elements of my past life experience to recombine into a new vehicle for my next leap. I don’t want to waste my time, so I’ve tried to be methodical and smart about it, but maybe I’m being too smart about it. That is, I’m designing a plan that on paper is very rational and personally insightful, but it’s a plan that I am not going to naturally follow. I need that room to move, perhaps, so I can practice the kind of furious creativity that I sense is achievable. And THAT kind of plan is more situational and reactionary, requiring that I trust my training to steer me away from fiery deathtraps. My experience with blogging has also taught me that almost everything I’ve done has merely opened more doors to opportunity. I don’t need an optimal plan after all. I need to just keep going.

Breaking this down simply, the action plan becomes merely this:

  • Choose the first plan that comes to mind
  • Check to make sure I won’t be worse off than I am now
  • Check to make sure that the plan is within my ability to execute
  • Run the plan, and trust that everything I’ve learned so far will steer me well

And perhaps I’m the only designer that blogs his plans like this. One of a very few, anyway. I don’t know why I do it, but I like sharing what I know with people who are engaged by the material. What would happen if I shared the entire design business process? That would be highly intriguing because it fulfills a number of past wishes I’ve had:

  • I’ve thought it would be neat to found my own new media school, once I found some other people to work with it.
  • In the past, I’ve always appreciated it when people shared their processes with me. A lot of process just isn’t in books.
  • In my recent experiences getting up to speed with Actionscript 3, C#, and XNA, I’ve been struck by how little intermediate-level material there is. There’s plenty of simple tutorial material, much of it seemingly written by people who don’t actually do the stuff for a living. What I’d like to see more of is WORKING CODE written by people who are trying to solve larger problems that go beyond gluing one software component to another. This requires some architectural thinking.
  • I’ve wished for a body of best practices that I could refer to, absolutely trustworthy and meticulously documented.

I am, essentially, starting over with the design business. If I were to take that very literally, it means I’d be starting from scratch, like I was in my 20s. And I think it might be very refreshing to actually adopt that mindset of being an utter noob again, except this time I actually have my current body of experience to guide me. Starting over isn’t so bad when you’ve got a guide that tells you it’s OK to not know everything, but you’ve got to master a number of specific abilities before you are allowed to leave the temple.

More thoughts to come.

6 Comments

  1. stephan Fassmann 15 years ago

    There is an old saying in engineering, Be prepared to throw the first one away. In Other Words, The first time you do something you learn a lot from doing it.
    Doing it a second time will go a lot faster because you how to do and you’ll do it a lot better because you know what the important things are and your limitations.
    Sounds like you’ve got some great plans. You can do it.

  2. Emmanuel Tabarly 15 years ago

    I think your action plan is great. Perhaps I would hesitate on step 1 between that and “choose the one thing you know you crave to do, but you’ve always found excuses not to try it”. But I wouldn’t touch step 2,3 and 4. Actually, on step 2, making sure you won’t be worse off is probably either (a) impossible or (b) a reason to not go there…

    I wish I has words of wisdom to share. I just left a 10 year “career” in a respectable industry (ha!) to start from scratch, really, just like you said. And though I may not feel 20, I am surrounded by twentysomethings (went back to grad school).

    But I digress. What I wanted to say is that I finally accepted the idea of taking a big risk. That and the fact that I’ve lived half of my life (statistically) and I didn’t want the other half to be predictably un-fulfilling.

    Cheers Dave.

  3. Fabian Kruse 15 years ago

    The action plan sounds quite interesting. I know this way of intuitive working very well… for me, it´s easier when there is some kind of commitment made with someone – that somehow becomes a trigger to REALLY take action and leave perfectionist-procrastination behind.
    Let us know how the business reset goes on!

  4. Senia 15 years ago

    Three thoughts:

    1) Like a wise person (i.e. you) once said, “Start anywhere.”  Go for it, start anywhere.

    2) I like what Kathy Sierra says about business models – saw this in a Joel on Software article:

    “Kathy Sierra taught me that if you can’t explain your mission in the form, ‘We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,’ you are not going to have passionate users. What’s your tagline? Can you fit it into that template?”

    3) I like the Communicatrix’ business model:
    here.

    Best!
    Go for it!

  5. Nollind Whachell 15 years ago

    “Just what AM I selling? What is it WORTH? And WHO is going to BUY it?”

    To me this entire post is encapsulated within these few questions.

    What is it WORTH and WHO is going to buy it are the fairly easy parts. You’re WORTH the time you put into whatever you do (you can easily calculate this out). And WHO buys it are those people who VALUE it and/or are INSPIRED by it.

    The hard part is the “what AM I selling”. Really what you are asking here is “Who AM I?” Or put another way, “What’s so special about me?”

    This is something I’m working on right now and interestingly enough I think there is a sort of formula or structured approach to figuring it out. You’re probably going to laugh at this but to me it equates very closely to creating a character in a role playing game or within an MMO.

    Even funnier is that I think it might be possible to create a form that helps you easily construct and visualize WHO you are and what sets you apart from others. In effect, think of it like your character sheet in D&D which breaks down things like your abilities, skills, alignment, and so forth.

    Now think of the process that you go through in creating a character. You roll your abilities and from those abilities you determine what role, profession, or class would be the most suitable for. For example, if you have high Strength, you might choose a Warrior. If you have high Intelligence, you might be a Wizard. What interesting to note is that you can utilize these different abilities in many different ways to create a unique character.

    That’s the same thing I’m noticing with my natural abilities in my own life.  My creative problem solving abilities have been useful in not only just technical support, but in coding / programming and even in leading and managing a team of web professionals. Who knows what other roles they could be utilized within?

    “I ended up drawing a kind of small store, which for me is imbued with the notion of tangible goods in a community context”

    Dave, I kid you not. Your ability to draw diagrams like this seems to me to be a natural ability. For example, how hard was it for you to draw that? If it was fairly easy then I’d say you have a natural ability at visualizing complex things in a simple way. This is an extremely beneficial ability that will help you to communicate ideas with clarity.

    ”…but every single time I’ve done something interesting it’s been from the hip or from the heart.”

    See my comment about belief in your other post. This sounds strangely the same. I also find though that I work better in reactive situations. For example, when I used to work for a web firm in town here, I’d have people coming to me throughout the day with problems. I love it and thrived in that environment. It was almost though the bigger the problem, the more I enjoyed the challenge.

    “Kathy Sierra taught me that if you can’t explain your mission in the form, ‘We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,’ you are not going to have passionate users. What’s your tagline?”

    Senia has an excellent point here. As soon as I read this I realized why my belief (as noted in my comment on your other post) was so effective in overcoming obstacles at work and opponents in games.

    Simply put, if you can simplify the obstacle and your desired objective, your belief is easier to focus upon. For me in gaming, it was easy. My objective was to get around the obstacle which was my opponent. That’s it. I just continually visualized myself getting past them. Therefore it made it extremely simple to focus on. Again how I achieved the solution didn’t matter, I would just continually try different things until I achieved success.

    So with regards to what Senia said, if you made a simple statement indicating your desired object “Dave Seah is awesome at XXXX” and it’s something you can truly believe in, then you will achieve it. Actually the faster you attempt things and the more you desire to experiment and learn from your failures, the faster you will succeed at achieving your objective.

    That’s basically how I became so good at FPS games. Once I knew what I wanted to achieve (i.e. to “flow” past my opponents), I just practiced continually with others until I achieve my desired objective. Yes I failed numerous times at first but over time, as I learned from my failures, my desired objective became a reality. Again the sooner you fail, the sooner you will succeed. The difficulty is accepting failure as natural part of the process towards achieving success. Thanks for reminding me of this.

  6. Fred Schechter 15 years ago

    Dave,
    I’ve had this post up on my browser for 3 days now, because I knew it would be utterly wrong to miss, and that it both applied to me, and was integral to what you are doing.
    Best of all, the comments are here and they’re often as telling as the article itself.
    My first thought, to apply to your process, and what you do, I think of the company X-plane that does infographic work to explain ideas for presentations/advertising. Then on top of that, I think of your amazing forms. Combining the two tells me that your “Dave does” statement is, “Dave does process planning layout and associated graphics”. That gives you a wide open field, but truly explains what you are doing. Maybe simpler, “Dave does planning for work, graphically”
    Maybe just “Dave helps you get work done (and know when you’re done doing it).”

    Anway, having you at a parallel point in time in a different field is such a help to look over and read your well composed thoughts that express the issues a lot of us are dealing with is fantastic.

    Finally, would some real advertisers show up and start paying money to be on your blog site here, they’re fools not to!! (maybe it’s just time to make some calls).

    Thanks again Dave!! (You’ve got me thinking again!)