Photo of three SR-71 Blackbirds designed by the Skunk Works—NASA

I have always been interested with how other industries tackle innovation and design, particularly in the times before the modern world of software & technology altered the landscape of design process. We’ll look at the spark behind how innovation teams became popular and what lessons have stood the test of time...

What is ‘Skunk Works’?

We’ve all heard mentions of small, nimble, innovation teams given autonomy to tackle some of their industry’s hardest problems.

Origins

During World War II it was discovered that the German forces were developing technology that would change the face of warfare, high performance aircraft powered by the ‘jet engine’. The time was June 1943, the Air Tactical Service Command of the US Army Air Force met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, and laid the gauntlet to design and build a superior aircraft to meet the threat. Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, an aeronautical engineer, and team delivered a proposal a month later for the ‘XP-80’ USA’s first jet fighter.

Having secured the contract this sparked the creation of the ‘Skunk Works’ team, a rapid and secretive design and development process, that astonishingly delivered the aircraft in just 143 days, a whole 7 days ahead of schedule. This new process spawned a legacy of rapidly designed and tested aircraft that completely changed the face of aviation (i.e. SR-71: fastest manned aircraft, F-117: world’s first stealth fighter) with advanced research and development with the methods Skunk Works developed at its core.

The F-80 Shooting Star, the first jet designed by Skunk Works—USAF

Developing cutting-edge technology needs scientific rigor & process, but also creative vision and problem solving. This balance is crucial especially for the aerospace realm, where designs and solutions need to work across diverse and harsh constraints and the extremes of physical environments.

What is the Skunk Works process?

When thinking about the process, there are two main dimensions, the team and the methods, informed and influenced even today by ‘Kelly’s Rules’.

The team

A small number of skilled and empowered individuals form the core team, who operate in secrecy in a dedicated space — away from risk of espionage and inadvertent sharing or exposure of the work. For example during the development of the XP-80 just 5 people out of the 130+ people working on it knew that they were developing a jet aircraft!

These individuals are directed by a manager who is given almost complete autonomy and control over the program and trusted to keep the team on track and record the progress. There is a delicate balance between the need for velocity and exploration of diverse concepts whilst ensuring results are iterated on to deliver results to solve the problems in the brief.

Independence & Low Overhead

Providing the team with independence and autonomy is a critical aspect of the process. Removing barriers and red-tape is a key element to enable faster progress. In large organisations there are frequently significant barriers & bureaucracy that slows down progress due to the quantity of stakeholders and culture of “review by committee”, where even small fixes need various levels of input.

By empowering small and nimble teams to move quickly and make their own decisions this allows the team to best solve the problems the way they believe is best. The manager provides transparency to key stakeholders through progress reports and detailed reports for important and key decisions.

Velocity

With a focus on moving rapidly and developing prototypes over fully defining every last detail up front. This design and tweak model enables iterations to be developed quickly to learn how best to solve the outlined problems. Breaking down these problems and tackling them through iterative prototypes was key. This of course goes hand in hand with empowering the team to make decisions and implement fixes along the way to negate the need for the dreaded “design by committee”.

In short—trusted talented small teams disentangled from bureaucracy focussed on solving challenges through rapid prototyping unlocks a speed of execution that is unparalleled.

One of the crowing achievements of Skunk Works, the SR-71 — Photo by Bryan Goff on Unsplash

Examples of Innovation Teams

The success of Skunk Works has inspired many organisations to apply the learnings and processes to their domain, leading to innovation and evolutionary leaps for those who tried…

Apple’s Industrial Design Group

Under Jony Ive’s time at Apple, the secretive design lab was home to defining the future of products for Apple.

Apple’s HQ—Photo by Carles Rabada on Unsplash

“Ive’s Industrial Design group is small, about 20 designers from around the world. They are extremely tight-knit, especially because many of them have worked at Apple for decades.”

Leander Kahney—Cult of Mac: How Apple’s super-secret Industrial Design team really works

Adopting the same philosophy from Skunk Works, small independent teams working in secret, and having a dedicated space off-limits to most of the Apple employees, reporting to the Chief Design Officer. Conducting frequent 3 hour brainstorms with the design team, Ives would focus the team on brainstorming specific design challenges with the collective power of the talented small team:

“We’ll sit there with our sketch books, and sketch and trade ideas and go back and forth. That’s where the very hard, brutal, honest criticism comes in and we thrash through ideas until we really feel like we’re getting something.”

Apple designer Christopher Stringer—link

The iPhone was developed in secret with small and nimble teams, dedicated to developing rapid prototypes and proof of concepts to paint a picture of possibilities. For more I recommend reading The Secret Origin Story of the iPhone.

IBM Research

IBM has a deep history of investing in research and development, leading to inventions and evolutions in technology, over the years being awarded 6 Nobel Prizes, 6 Turing Awards, additionally the company has generated a record 150,000+ patents, more than any other business as of 2018. The R&D arm of IBM has its origins in Columbia University and the 1945 opening of the Watson Scientific Computing Lab. Now IBM has some 12 dedicated R&D labs around the world with a focus on inventing the future of computer technology.

IBM Notebook—Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

“The confluence of the technologies we’re building represent a step change in computing that will surpass anything we’ve seen before. Together, they can exponentially alter the speed and scale at which we can uncover solutions to complex problems. We’ve come to call this accelerated discovery.”

IBM Research—link

This so called ‘accelerated discovery’ is driven by scientific approaches, mirroring Skunk Works processes. Using data and evidence to inform decisions and drive innovation…

It means coming up with new ideas and making careful observations that can refute or support them, so that we know even more. It means poking at the world to see what happens.

IBM Research, The Urgency of Science

IBM has been wildly successful, responsible for generating inventions such as the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the smartphone, the portable computer, the Automated Teller Machine, Watson artificial intelligence and the Quantum Experience.

Ford Motors: Project Petunia

With a company the size and complexity of Ford, designing and visioning big bets such as the re-imagining of the Ford GT40 the ‘ultimate American sports car’ is incredibly daunting. The answer group VP Raj Nair had was to gather a small ‘skunkworks’ team of around 15 to envision and design the car in secrecy. The were located below Ford’s main ‘Product Development Centre’ in the basement!

The Ford GT — Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

“We had a very small, dedicated team working downstairs in secret with an aligned objective… the decision makers were only four or five people… With design in a small room and studio engineering right there consistently to-ing and fro-ing allowed us to do things quickly.”

— Moray Callum, VP Ford Global Design, in this great article from hotrod.com

This approach worked—the car won best in class at the historic Le Mans event in 2016. Taking just 14 months for which typically takes 3 years the small empowered team, with the key decision makers involved throughout, enabled not only a rapid pace but a focussed and visionary effort to create a revolutionary award winning sports car.

Learnings for UX & Design

So what can we can learn from these rules and processes? How might it apply and inform how we tackle complex challenges in product design today?

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

Moving fast: The importance of velocity

This is frequently an achilles heel in many teams, the desire for ideas, concepts, designs to be ‘perfect’ often outweighs the desire to use design as tool to learn. Often the sheer organisational weight of decision making prevents teams from moving quickly and frequently the fear of sharing work in progress adds an additional time burden. Of course in a perfect world your organisation has the UX maturity to understand early work such as wireframes, sketches, concepts etc—however this isn’t always the case so often early work is misinterpreted or misunderstood.

The motto ‘progress over perfection’ rings true here, how might we all adopt a rapid learning cycle? Knowing when design can metaphorically ‘let go’ in certain parts of the product design lifecycle is crucial, what do we need to learn and what’s the quickest way to learn it, what do we need to create and test in order to learn?

In the case of Skunk Works it was developing technology to have an advantage in the Cold War, in product design the stakes a lot lower but for example: being first to market or being first to provide and maintain the superior experience is incredibly factor for success.

Rapid Prototyping & Testing: Bring Ideas to life

The power of prototypes cannot be underestimated, especially when used as a communication medium, so many questions can be answered and so much ambiguity can be cleared up. Complexity can be visualised much more efficiently with prototypes than static visuals, with interactions visualised, navigation patterns shown with transitions and animations bringing the ideas to life. Essentially prototyping and testing increases confidence before committing wider resources to expensive and timely production.

Testing prototypes—Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

Developing a toolkit of prototypes or a rapid prototyping program is crucial for success. The are a whole range of prototypes you and your teams can create to ranging from basic ‘tap-through mocks’ which are cheap and fast to produce (especially if using tools such as Figma), through to fully fledged working prototypes created with Engineering teams. Of course the spectrum comes with a time trade-off, but the point being, in early stages use the right tool at the right stage to answer the immediate questions in front of you.

The Skunk Works team broke down the problem spaces into distinct areas to solve, using iterative prototypes to best answer the problem. Testing early and often to use a data driven decision making process.

Trust & Empowerment: Reducing Barriers

Perhaps one of the harder elements to influence is trust. So much of this is dependant on a range of factors, UX maturity within the organisation, ‘newness’ and past successes of the team, age of the product, size of the organisation etc etc etc. However, without trust and without meaningful empowerment speed and velocity of execution is negatively impacted.

You can increase trust through transparency, by involving the key decision makers throughout, using design artefacts (such as prototypes) with frequent communication to again visualise progress. A critical part of process is to remove barriers, empower the team to make the decisions needed along the way, but this doesn’t mean excluding the key stakeholders it simply means removing the ‘messy middle’ and multitude of opinions that are potentially distracting from and slowing down progress—especially true for larger organisations.

In the case of Skunk Works some of Kelly’s rules stipulated that the “manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects”, but this also meant reports were generated, monthly cost reviews, and “important work must be recorded thoroughly”. None of this process means working in a vacuum, but there has to be an element of trust and empowerment to remove the barriers to meaningful progress, that progress needs to be transparent and guided by key leaders in the organisation.

In Summary

Not every situation calls for a Skunk Works style setup, but in order to make evolutionary leaps the process can be incredibly successful when it comes to creating the future for your organisation. It all boils down to a small talented team, empowered to tackle your hardest and most complex challenges through streamlined processes.

On the edge of space in the SR-71—USAF