Original Art By Josh Mahoney

Have you ever pondered how you would get something as heavy as water up to a moon colony in an economical way? How about how mail service would work in the wizarding world while still being unnoticed by muggles? Or maybe you’ve contemplated more complex matters of emotions, like how you fight homesickness far out in space, light years away from home. These are all problems authors face when they write any fantastical tale. Their greatest challenge may be how to make the future look plausible to their audience. Their task is to get their audience to engage with a story on a level where they are willing to suspend disbelief and, hopefully, take the leap into the unknown with you. So, how do you share your imagination with the imagination of another clearly enough that they catch your vision?

Some creative problems are easier to solve than others. The creators of Star Trek fought homesickness by making a virtual reality “holodeck” to simulate scenes from Earth. J.K. Rowling envisioned a postal service run by owls, winged creatures common to both cities and suburbs. And Andy Weir, the author of Artemis, imagined a not too distant future where compressed hydrogen, which is one-ninth the mass of water, was shipped up to the moon on rockets. The colonists combined it with oxygen they acquired on the moon as a byproduct of smelting aluminum — a bountiful mineral there — and then they had all the ingredients necessary for water.

These examples are what’s known in Sci-Fi and Fantasy writing as “world-building.” It’s the literary technical process in which an author crafts an imaginary world — another realm — with everything from the small details Tolkien weaves in like Frodo’s sword “Sting” that glows if there are any Orcs around, to more complex information such as the histories and genealogies he creates to help you understand the back story of Middle Earth. Whether it’s a new take on magical metallurgy or cultivating culture, all of these decisions of mechanics and mythos in our favorite stories are world-building.

Today, dear reader, we are going to move back and forth between the fantastic and the real, the allegorical and the concrete. I’m not going to quote case studies, recite pithy acronyms, or list a set of five takeaways. My central ask of you is for you to move away from the simple math of prioritization, reading metrics, and finding ways to motivate your team. I need you to be open to do something different. At the end of the day, the best practices are just practice. The metric for whether my essay succeeds is not based on getting you to a learning target of 3.5 out of 5 on your comprehension of the material covered; it succeeds if you start a new practice, and then practice the practice. The practice we are going to learn is world-building in the real world.

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

Let’s imagine you’re an apprenticing product manager, and the product wizard mentoring you has gone home for the night, and you still have several tasks you need to complete. There is a whole sprint’s worth of work to finish and product requirements to deliver. You are overloaded and tired, so you do what you’ve been taught: you go to the data. You find a small feature hidden in the spreadsheet with promising forecasts; you launch it, and it works. So you attempt to duplicate your efforts after reviewing the data of your first launch. You summon another similar feature to copy the success of the first. And so on and so on. However, a week later, customer complaints start to pour in and revenue starts to fall. Your new features have gone off the rails.

You’ve likely caught on now to the fact that I’m trying to show the perilous conundrum most product managers find themselves in. Let’s look at it through the example of another fantasy character. Like Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, we are often playing with a force we don’t quite understand, attempting to duplicate past results, with little understanding of where we are going. The logic is that if two brooms worked to fill the cauldron, four is even better. Right? Mickey does not stop to think, How can I turn all of this off when my task is done? or How will I clean up the water that spills? There are externalities to consider as well, for example, flooding the whole workshop. And then there are second or third-order consequences that could occur. Instead, Mickey follows the data, and the result is he rushes the process and breaks everything.

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

“Bowling with Sacred Cows,” I call it. Yes, on one level, they are trying something new, but they’re also just staying in a lane — they are bowling. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen that bowling mentality stem from, “X other company is doing this, or I read this on y blog.” The conclusion is we should try it because we are data-driven and open to experiments. This is tech in a nutshell, you’ll see it at start-ups, scale-ups, and the titans. Being data-driven wasn’t invented the day the book Moneyball was written. Even Mickey was being data-driven.

It’s rare ever to see a real hypothesis pipeline of new ideas. And there is a good reason for this, much like Mickey, the magic we have encountered has stifled our imagination and it’s just easier to summon the brooms and settle for small marginal returns quarter over quarter. But once those brooms aren’t working fast enough, you might try similar brooms with minor adjustments until you get a Nimbus 2000. This is what Tyler Cowen, the American Economist, labeled “The Great Stagnation.” Cowan argues that advanced economies have plateaued as all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered (advances in transport, communications, education, etc.), and innovation rates have fallen. Much of what we see today in the tech world is a rehashing of derivative ideas jam-packed into the timetables of funding rounds.

Thus, we often find ourselves in some kind of paradox as Product Managers. On one hand, we recognize, as Charles Sanders Peirce, an American Pragmatist Philosopher, says, “No new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically.” However, on the other hand, we are asking you to be data-driven and innovative while insisting on proof before investing in the endeavor. Welcome to the Catch-22 of new product development: be original, but show me the evidence first. Better yet, talk to customers and see what they want. That’s certainly an interesting concept, but the customers I’ve dealt with rarely come up with new ideas themselves. Customer interviews can generate great ideas, but you must see them when they appear.

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

How do we break out of this paradox?

First, consider this: What is it that separates a film like No Country for Old Men, from cinematographer Roger Deakins or the photos of Ansel Adams from your iPhone selfies or home movies you made as a child? Trust me when I say it’s not just the 10,000-hour rule or some misunderstood genius, hiding somewhere like a divine mystery. In reality, it’s a practice of seeing the world and then knowing how to use the tools you have available well enough to capture what you see. In photography, it’s called “developing your eye.” The images we see the world over, from the awe-inspiring covers of National Geographic to the social media ads that pop a little more than others, all have a photographer behind them and that person has gone on this journey to develop their eye.

An early pioneer in photography, Henri Cartier Bresson, put it like this:

“Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity… Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.”

Anyone can click a button; it’s actually the choices — the aperture, lighting, angles, rule of thirds, etc. — you make and the refinement of those choices, based on taste, that make you a better photographer. And much like painting, photography is made of elements or compositions as Bresson points out — the rubric of choices we can make that capture reality (including line, color, shape, value, texture, form, and space). I want you to consider that those same things exist in innovation. I want to show you that there is a composition of innovation, and with practice, you can start to see the kaleidoscopic world, the same way a photographer sees the world. An innovator just sees the opposite of what the photographer sees — they see the gaps, the things not yet there. This is the science fiction unfolding in front of them, not yet created. They see schematics of customer problems everywhere they turn. They practice seeing the unseen, and then build the mental image before summoning it tangibly in front of them. They are building their “innovator’s eye.”

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

Innovators see the world not yet uncovered — a veiled world with an overlay of the future. This is world-building in the real world. This is a big difference: innovators aren’t just data-driven; they are working on the new things that will create the data. They are creating a workshop in their minds, building a place where you can build as well; it’s a place of gears, machines, and imagination — a visual playground. Einstein also talked about thinking in images, like a muscle built up over time. So what do we do? How can we think not just linear ideas or simple systems, but in images, in complex mosaics overlapping reality?

This is often the issue those who are technically inclined or business savvy encounter. Unless they have played an instrument, dabbled in creative writing, or painted, they rarely see this “science.” This is the slow, step-by-step process of teaching yourself something and getting better at it as you try to measure it against good taste, past masters, and the brutal critique of those closest to you. You may take 1,000 photos and then cull them down to two or three you want to show your friends, and then after you have taken 10,000 photos, you might find one good one you’d show your public. Except, for our purposes, we are talking about ideas, immature ideas, long before they are tested in the market. And they all need to be written down, scribbled out, and diagramed in a sketchbook.

Go on 100 missions, walk around town, talk to strangers, and recreate products and services. While you’re having lunch at a particular restaurant, think of new ways to do restaurant service. Watch a particular intersection and see if you could help the flow of traffic. Trying to find five useful features you could add to a simple household appliance like a toaster. Once you are out of your comfort zone and have gone on a few missions, begin thinking from “first principles,” so you are deconstructing and reconstructing at the same time. Ask why we have golden calves and sacred cows, and bring your own cow to market. On one side of your mind, you become a champion breeder of fine beef, and on the other side you have a slaughterhouse. “Kill your darlings” maybe, but, I’d suggest letting them breed too.

Study the agricultural and horticultural concepts of grafting, so you can understand how to cross-pollinate things across sectors, disciplines, and cultures at their origin. Approach more mature ideas and graft ideas that are less mature onto them. Essentially you can approach the life cycle of ideas at many levels, but keep in mind you are working in the composition of the unknown, the unreal, and the undefined. So here is my advice to you, write what you know, explore what you don’t, because what you’ll often find is that your expertise in one area can cross-pollinate in another area. Often the problem you are trying to solve was already solved and has matured, in another sector with a different application. And once you’ve gone on 100 missions, go on 100 more. Go on missions until it’s an annoying habit your friends and family can’t stand.

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

Stop doing science and start doing science fiction

Here is what I propose: The workshop of the mind is work within yourself and the work of futurecraft. It’s the summoning of the future, often by means of play. So, show me the unseen, practice seeing the unseen every day, and then leave bread crumbs for others to follow. This is why we are talking about world-building, creating things that don’t currently exist, or at least don’t exist in a form we are using now. Keep in mind this is fun, the same fun you had when you were playing with Legos and threw away the instructions, built something new, maybe even an amalgamated masterpiece of the wrong pieces, fit together in a way only you could see.

You would be shocked by how few product managers, and even entrepreneurs, actually do this. You want to know a particular phrase I’ve never heard in over ten years of being a Product Manager? “The other day I was at the library.” Start there, and start in the science fiction section, Google and blogs are making you lazy at the most important juncture in your journey. To quote the master of imagination, Haruki Murakami, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” So, look for books that are out of print to assist your innovation! The harder they are to find, the better. Start looking for ideas in places long forgotten and see how they mesh with today’s world and your missions.

Your task is to invent out of thin air, except you understand how air works and how it can be used to lift something. You are seeing things that don’t yet exist, and you do that by way of world-building and applying them to real-world problems. But it’s a practice, the same way developing your eye in photography or painting is something you build over time. As you mine these ideas from the sweat of your brow, eventually you’ll strike a vein right there in your sketchbook. Something deep within you will be brought to the surface of the page. It won’t be something repackaged or rebranded, but something that existed just out of reach that you pull into reality.

In patent law, this was once called a “flash of genius” — the notion that somehow, magically, an idea popped into your brain. I think that is hogwash; I don’t believe people have a flash of sudden inspiration out of nowhere. I think they practice a lot and then the genius reaches a boiling point, and then you start to notice a good idea, spilling all over your kitchen.

So, Mickey, how are you going to fill your time? With your own honed and refined ideas, or are you going to have the brooms do it for you?

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

It’s about who you are

Here is the fine print about innovation: Essentially you are going on a journey, a hero’s journey in the 21st Century, to lean into a new frontier. There are no maps to get you there. There is often little past data to work with; after all, what past data can you use regarding how to get to the moon before July 1969? You have to chart a trajectory based on other sources; you can’t get to the moon in a data-driven way the first time. You can speculate; but, ultimately, you have to be willing to explore, to move out into the darkness and lead others. It’s often the blind leading the blind and that’s okay because a million bats can find their way out of a cave in an hour. It can be done. What you’ll often find, however, is sometimes it’s not creating a new idea that’s the hard part. It’s getting everyone around you to believe, to follow you, and ultimately set sail, tacking as the winds change. “There be dragons,” on this journey, trust me, St. George.

And you will have to fight these dragons. Here’s the thing about the dragons, though: They are not the monsters of myth and legend, serpents the size of buildings, a metaphor you conquer once and save the village. No, in fact, these dragons are often relatively small, like little bees doing daily flybys, “buzzing the tower” of your brain to sow doubt, to deceive, and to discourage you each time you have an idea. They are the hive following you everywhere, telling you, “If you just had more funding;” “If you only had your own team;” “Don’t say something stupid in this meeting;” or “If only you had more time.” This is what novelist Steven Pressfield has called “the resistance,” the demotivating buzzing circling you until you go back to what’s easy, planned, and orderly. The most dangerous bees being the one’s telling you to only look back at the data (and by data, I mean only the data you currently have).

Original Art By Josh Mahoney

There are no safe answers for going to the moon. Moonshots, by their very nature, are unsafe. They are dangerous because there is no hiking trail beaten underfoot by past generations. You will be bushwhacking, machete in hand, only able to see a few meters in front of you. But, here’s the thing, if you start down the trail, people will start to follow because the trail in business is the story — it’s the story you tell, not just about the product or service you are creating, but the journey of creating the future. Often, this compelling story can be harder to craft than coming up with an original idea. What you’ll find though is, if you can do the world-building, you’re already a step ahead when trying to tell this story.

Step away from the spreadsheet, your new multi-step innovation method, or the blog giving you eight ways to do something. You can come back to these later stages of product development in prototyping, go-to-market, and where data is the most powerful, optimization. Instead, take your notebook and start world-building, start writing your first novel, even if it is just the story of how people are going to use your next product. It is in this practice you’ll start to develop your eye, and by doing so, the future.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.