And so there are electrical engineers, statisticians,
people like that with those kind of skills.
What kind of role do those people have in an insurance company?
From the insurance company perspective they certainly are aliens.
And so as aliens in the insurance company, what they bring, the positive thing they
bring is they brought this ability to look at large amounts of data and
to begin to make sense out of it.
And so one thing was health insurance, you have a person who gets a prescription,
then go to the doctor.
They go to the doctor to get a prescription.
Then something else happens and they get a prescription again, they go to the doctor.
How do we understand that?
Are there patterns there, are there things that we can see?
Really, really small patterns happening out of this big amount of data.
And these particular aliens are the ones who could understand that kind of thing.
And so you want to bring those people inside your organizations who have those
kind of skills.
And we talked earlier, from the organizational constraint perspective, for
example, where these kind of people, it's really difficult to bring them in,
because we're not sure what they know.
We're not sure how to work with them.
We're not sure, even whether we like them or not.
But it's important that we do that.
Next we might let other people do the hard part.
Eric Von Hippel calls these people lead users.
And so lead users are people who are really, they're often not,
they're not professionals.
They're not people who are paid to do this thing.
But they're people who are so rabidly into a hobby or
into a type of product that they just can't be stopped.
And so you may have a friend who is a bicycle nut, he's got a bicycle
that only weighs like three ounces he can hold it up with his finger and
goes a hundred miles an hour, it's made of carbon fiber, whatever.
But this person is not a bicycle manufacturer.
The person is a consumer of these things but who's always constantly tweaking and
making it better, making it better, making it better.
That person knows a great deal about bicycles.
I also recall an example from a long time ago, it seems like long in Internet years.
Where people were sort of fooling around with this thing called WiFi,
the wireless Internet, WiFi.
And this one person reported he had made a connection, a two mile connection on WiFi.
And that's pretty far, given the standard of WiFi is not that much.
I believe it's like 300 feet, and not two miles.
And the astounding thing was that on each end of that two miles was a antenna made
of a Pringles can.
So we know Pringles potato chips come in that little silver can, and
they were able to make the connection using those.
And so those are the kind of lead users who have a great deal of understanding and
who are pushing the limits of what we know.
They don't have the kind of conscious competence.
That is, that they don't know from a modeling and analytics, and
they're not designing it that way.
They're just trying things out.
And they're learning from that.
And so this might be a really good source of ideas that kind of solutions that you
might not come at in a sort of head on conventional way.
The next thing to know, is to understand how far do I invest?
The first problem is understanding how broad is this chasm?
Because if you don't put enough resources and time and money and
emotion into getting across this chasm, and only put half of that in there,
that's going to be a problem, right?
You fall into the chasm.
And so understand what it is you're going to take to invest.
If it's the biggest project you've ever signed off on,
you need to understand that and go ahead and commit.
And if you're not willing to commit, you're not going to make it halfway.
You're not going to make it all the way across the chasm by
resourcing it only halfway.
The other thing to understand though, is to understand that some things are,
if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.
And so there we also need to understand how hard is the problem, right?
We just talked about it.
How hard is the problem we're addressing, and
understand that there's sort of we've reached a certain point,
we may have to say to ourselves, you know what?
It's not worth getting there.
If you think about this in terms of your chances of success,
if you don't see success, if you don't see that you can be successful and
generally improve things, you may hit this point of diminishing returns, right?
Where we invest more, and we invest more, and we invest more, and
we only get a little bit out of it.
And so look at a curve like this where 80% more investment only gets you
20%more performance.
And you need to understand that and be able to say, okay, we've invested enough.
We're at the point of diminishing returns.
Let's ship it the way it is,
even though it hasn't met specifications that's like the A12.
Or, let's stop the project, because we're just putting good money after bad.