Small boys explode.
Every time we come in the door, shoes, jackets, hats, and masks go flying in the first four feet after entry. They then dash off to wash their hands. I survey the mound of former boy coverings. Sometimes I can get them to put more of it away, and sometimes I decide to let it go. The discarded items fall on top of a pile ever-growing from a closet near the door. I imagine it like a glacier moving out to sea.
My wife and I put some energy into trying to model better behavior for our sons, and we occasionally would point out how the pile is pushing out into the path as we enter. There is so much blocking our way already. Let's take a few seconds, put the items where they go, and not make this worse!
I have been in many UX and even business development situations that feel this way. We have a path made narrow, and now we are trying to figure out an elegant way to guide our customers, employees, or even ourselves through it. Let's put in a little discipline to make the navigation more automatic. Just take off your coat and put it in your bin! Let's help people not bump into the walls so much.
But all this is avoiding the real problem. There is a spill coming out of the closet. Why must this be accepted as the way things are? Why can't we make the whole situation easier while asking less of our customers and our children?
If we agree that the spill is the problem, how best to solve it? Often, we start with the surface area we see and start working our way back. After all, right in front of us, we can see coats. They should have been hung up instead of dropped. Let's just put some time into proper disposition.
This focus on doing a job right is creditable, but not where the leverage is. In a spill like this, about half of the mass hasn't seen daylight for months. There is no value there - bulk pushing things out. I go back and find clothes that do not fit our children anymore. The grocery bag we forgot about (yuck). Recycling. Items that didn't matter when they were first dropped - and we can validate that because they were at the back of the closet.
The solution? Elimination. These items are not driving value, so let's get them out. Maybe a storage unit, but likely a bunch of runs to Goodwill, trash, and recycling are in my immediate future.
In technology and business, this is where we look for cuts. How can we eliminate swaths of our business complexity. The question I ask is, "why is this here?" When the answer is forward-looking, it stays—for example, solving a customer's problem. Maybe it's part of the spill, but I think of this as "front of the closet." When the answer is historical, "Jim did this a few months ago when..." I think "back of the closet," and my eye trains on elimination. These issues are usually not that gray for most of the bulk - and where the answer is "I don't know," I leave it alone - plenty of obvious moves to take first,
An extraordinary output of this analysis is a lot of low-risk change. All require testing, but generally, our clients never see the difference except for a less-obstructed path.
One side-effect of this observation is that I have learned to let things get bad. Keeping everything tip-top as I go prevents the product or business from speaking back to me. Let the spill grow, then take care of it. Rather than chasing every imperfection, I make more significant differences with less cost. Plus, the requirement for modifying everyone elses' behavior goes down.
Give them the chance to interact with the environment, show its weaknesses, and focus energies on those using the "back of the closet" approach. I have enabled much better experiences in both my home and professional life with much less labor utilizing this framework.
I wonder if parents have an easier time with this philosophy due to the incorrigibleness of small children. I love my sons, and I know they are walking disasters. So are clients.
Like my sons, they can tumble in the door and see a broad, friendly expanse in front of them. And with joy in their hearts as they enter their home:
They explode.