Quantity Before Quality
Macaroons and tires have more in common than you might think. They are both born of French-style iterative obession with perfection. And anyone who has attempted to make the perfect macaroon, can attest to at least two things: French people are cranky, and perfect macaroon are RARE. But alas perhap I too am now cranky. Furthermore, it is even more rare to make a “perfect macaroon” on your first try. If this is your fate, please never again make macaroons since you will unlikely to ever attain the same level of success.
Making macaroons should be thought of as a process. And they only way to reach macaroon nirvana is to make a lot of bad macaroons. But alas C’est la vie! (That’s life!)
Many aspects of business work very well when you not only write rougness into the plan, but embrace it. Say you are designing a new user interface that will show lots of data, and will need to accomodate multiple screens and 3 different user personas. A great way to start this type of creative process is to merely see how many different forms you can create. Go for 100.
Your first one the blatantly obvious one will create a constraint, that you will work around for the second, and then that pair creates a bigger constraint for the third, etc. By the time you get past 10 or so. You have usually decomposed the problem into a set of components, and an easy way to 100 is to merely draw out (qucikly) all the combinations of your component list. Doing this has revelead that not all components combinations are sensible. (some combinations will focus too much on styling, and not content, or leave formatting neglected.
Also pictured above is a hat tip to Michelin Tires. Few know that tires were one of the original business that tollerated repeated bad designs. Michelin invented the innertube tires for bicycles in 1889. Imagine that no need for glue to dry before you tire was usable again. Michelin is the same organization that runs the acalimed “Michelin Star” rating system for very high end restaurants. As Michelin Tires moved into more performance tires, they started various types of treads to deal with water conditions. But all of this was done at the time of Hidden Figures. Even later as computers gain power to start modeling liquid dynamics of a tire - it is actually faster to produce a tire and test it.
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