ULEADD: Understand

Understand
An in-depth UNDERSTANDING of the expected outcomes, impacts and results at the onset of a deliverable.
Asking questions is critical and identifying the reasons behind what’s being delivered. (Who, What, When, etc.)

Our competitive advantage resides in our ability to rapidly learn the unknown and the ability to create value from it.

Curtis Thompson, Foundation for Value Creation

How is the unknown impacting the known and the unknown?

through various Gartner survey’s it is a clear trend that year over year analytics is having less of an impact on leadership decision-making (Gartner survey article)

The trend suggests that from 2018 to 2020 more efforts have been placed on managing data, ad hoc requests, and generating reports. Inversely less time has been placed on value added activities such as innovation, exploration, modeling and skill development. This trend is unsustainable if consistently growing an organization’s competitive advantage is the overall goal.in most organizations this data is dark and and even worse the awareness around the situation is dark.
This dynamic is what makes the Understand phase of ULEADD critical. It forces us to take the time to fundamentally understand our challenges and which opportunities we are best suited for the current goal.

Case Study

VHS Vs Betamax

Home movies & home video recording marketing

VHS (developed by JVC) & Betamax (developed by Sony) were the two predominant players in the Home video recording and home movie market in the 1980’s. During that time period a lot of American were making family home movie’s and home entertainment was growing relatively fast. Betamax was superior to VHS in nearly 80% of their product features. However, Betamax didn’t understand what mattered to the customer most. Where Betamax had better picture quality and the size of the tapes were smaller, they only recorded 1 hour worth of video. Their reasoning was that people would just buy more tapes if they wanted to record more videos. VHS initially released tapes that recorded 2 hours of video then expanded to 4 and 6 hours. This gave them the edge. they then furthered their competitive advantage by ReDesigning the box (or industry) that they were in. They began building relationships with motion picture companies so that movies were now released on VHS. This put them over the top. They fundamentally ReDeigned the home entertainment industry and decimated the closest competing product. VHS would remain the home entertainment standard until DVD was released in the 1990’s.

Case Study Takeaway

I look at this case as redesigning the box instead of thinking outside of the box because they didn’t use innovation to win. They used the dark data that was everywhere around them to ReDesign a more robust and integrated experience for their end consumer. This provided the consumer more value for the same or less money. The overall solution was also beneficial to JVC’s partner organizations as well. This was a simple solution that just required a deep understanding of opportunity and the ability to analyze what was at their fingertips.

Earn the right to design

Knowledge Acquisition Phase

Starting with the knowledge acquisition phase is important because it’s always better to know as much as reasonably possible before you start designing.