Megan West(erby)

How To Change Things

52weeksofux:

Let’s face it, change is difficult. For most human beings, change evokes fear and stress. Familiarity, on the other hand, is comforting. It allows us to live and operate with a certain level of ease which doesn’t require active thought at all times. This applies to your product just as much as our daily lives.

Building successful products rarely happens by doing what everyone else is doing—just prettier, faster or cheaper. Successful products happen by fundamentally changing people’s perception of what will fulfill their need and providing a painless transition into the “new”.

The next time you are sitting in a meeting discussing the next new feature to add, remember this:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

I’ve been thinking about systems and industries and solidification and change and building something new and tearing things down lately. I’m almost always in favor of making systems better, more responsive, of improving what already exists. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in creating new things, just that if we constantly think we need to chuck the bathwater out the baby lives in a state of Schrödinger cleanliness.

8 September 2010 ·

• Tags
• systems
• change