The Warehouse is Empty
Photo by Nick Benavides on Unsplash
I’m a big fan of Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon still stands as the best martial arts movie ever made, with honorable mentions going to Bloodsport and Above the Law. (Don’t @ me)
One of Bruce Lee’s famous quotes goes like this:
“Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.” — Bruce Lee
He’s getting at the notion of adaptability to any situation — a commentary on the choreographed martial arts of his day. Agility is especially applicable to product teams, but being water has a downside. We’re human and like water, we will take the path of least resistance.
New things rarely follow the easy path — they require new things. Re-imagined processes, capabilities and frequently, cultures. New is an act of creation and that requires energy, something water isn’t fond of dolling out. At work, this tendency for the easy answer manifests by teams looking for shortcuts — off the shelf answers to bespoke problems.
Here’s what happens — the company decides to go after a new opportunity, and the assigned team, trying to move as fast as possible, wonders aloud about what they can re-use. They go looking in the warehouse for an old solution to their new problem. We forget that the things gathering dust were built in a different time, in a different way, for a different reason.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” — Mark Twain
Imagine a car manufacturer deciding to ‘go electric’ and deciding first to look in the factory to see if they can cobble together an electric car. They might find an AC system and some tires, but they wouldn’t find the soul of an electric car — that has to be built. Worse, by going this route they’d miss the opportunity to elegantly solve the problem — like Frankenstein, the seams will show.
Tesla didn’t have a stack of dusty batteries in the warehouse to reuse. Uber didn’t have mapping software they could steal from some long-forgotten corporate project. Amazon didn’t have a fleet of trucks idling away, ready to be repurposed as Prime shipping advanced from 2 days to 1 day, to 1 hour.
No, these teams started with the problem at hand and reasoned their way up to the right answer, building what they needed. They didn’t begin with what they already had, and neither should you. Don’t head to the warehouse with a flashlight — it’s empty.
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