

How Iteration-itis Kills Good Ideas - orky56
http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2011/07/is_iteration-itis_killing_your.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-blog_posts-_-How%20Iteration-itis%20Kills%20Good%20Ideas

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nhashem
There are some good prescriptive ideas in this article about how to avoid
"iteration-itis." However, any leadership that implores their employees to
give them more 'raw' ideas needs to be prepared to actually act on it.

I was once in an organization that identified this problem and did the
"science fair" equivalent (we actually called it "Hack Day"), and the whole
company launched into it with a fervor. It was incredibly rewarding and
exciting to work on our out of the box ideas and present our various visions
of the future of the company to the highest level executives. They reacted
incredibly pleased, talked constantly about making sure some of these ideas
would become reality... and then... nothing. We had a down quarter in
revenue/profit so it was back to squeezing juice from the lemon.

It's common for employees to joke about management dysfunction, but whenever
that Hack Day was brought up, it's pointlessness wasn't just joked about but
attacked with bitterness even months and months later. I realized that when we
pitched ideas that had gone through iteration-itis, it the process ended up
tempering our own expectations as well, so by the time we pitched to the
execs, our emotional investment had been whittled down to mostly nothing. But
doing this -- asking us for our unfiltered ideas and thus, our unfiltered
enthusiasm, and then not acting on them -- was probably the worst thing they
could have done to destroy morale aside from layoffs.

~~~
shn
I wonder if those ideas would have needed a lot of funding to fly or risked
the company if implemented. Probably what company should have done is let the
employees implement one of those good ideas and have it implemented during a
"20 percent time" like Google and make it grow organically.

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jleader
There appear to be two different senses of the word "iteration" in play here.

There's the sense common on HN, where it refers to getting the idea out in
front of real customers, and then making changes to it in an attempt to
improve it. HN folks generally think this kind of iteration should be done as
rapidly as possible.

The article uses "iteration" in a different sense, to mean repeated cycles of
discussion and rethinking the idea, _before_ getting it in front of real
customers.

The first kind of iteration can be measured by the number of successive
versions of the software, website, product, whatever get shown to real users.
The second kind (as the article describes) can be measured by the number of
meetings held to discuss and refine the idea.

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Cushman
When did "iteration" start meaning "talk the idea over as much as possible
before anyone who can make a decision sees it"? That sounds like the exact
opposite of iteration.

It's totally a problem, but "iteration-itis" makes it sound like this is the
result of too much iteration.

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cHalgan
There are some good general ideas in this article, but they will not work...

The problem with ideas in big corporations are the following: \- Something
vaguely similar is already planned to implemented by some other group in the
company. So VP of that division will fight against it. (i.e., suggesting to
implement something like Heroku in SalesForce - isn't Force.com doing that
already?).

\- The idea might cannibalize the existing market (cloud? are you crazy? we
sell software licences.)

\- The idea will not generate significant revenue in short term (hey, the idea
is great, but feature X is needed by our customer which pays with gold bricks)

\- The idea might expose some incompetence in the organization (i.e., that
something was actually easy to do).

\- The idea might require that you actually talk to customers and then legal
will come in picture and that require additional approvals from legal

\- The idea might cause more work for your manager and his manager. And with
two kids and corporate job nobody wants more work.

And even the idea gets pass initial phase (you hired team, doing customer
interviews, started coding), the (E)VP which sponsored the idea might leave
the company and everything will be killed.

~~~
keithpeter
SO basically its a scale thing? Small companies, less chance of tripping over
these issues?

~~~
cHalgan
Correct: that is what I learn from my experience. Of course even small
companies might have issues with "innovations" for low level employees, but
big companies have people, processes and revenue structures in place which are
essentially incompatible with innovation.

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ilamont
The other thing that kills good ideas at big companies is an inability to
execute and build support around it (even if the top dogs give it a nod). Can
the idea be built and implemented in-house, and if it is, will there be buy-in
to support it?

Over time, the negative feedback loop can lead people to aim low during the
ideation phase -- submit smaller ideas that don't have to go through a half-
dozen committees, are easier to implement, and are easy to build support
around.

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mattgreenrocks
It's not just design by committee (though it amazes me how many companies
still think they're somehow able to design with any sort of integrity using
this method). It's also the fact that it's quite common to have a manager who
lacks the sort of vision needed for their job (as management is the default
route up the ladder), yet manages people who are generating new ideas and ends
up stifling them, perhaps inadvertently.

It galls me, because it seems so simple. I'll get out my thick brush here, and
say that over time, institutions seem to only ever be good at perpetuating
themselves, rather than tackling the problems they were originally formed for.

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lautenbach
"Iteration-itis" is going right next to "analysis paralysis" on the shelf of
business jargon that I actually don't mind because it's useful in illustrating
a point.

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rjd
OR "How to many chefs ruin the broth".

Makes me wonder about the level of academics at Harvard when they are
promoting articles as useless as that one.

~~~
namank
Thats actually a paper by a professor from Northwestern.

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jjmaxwell4
A possible cause of this could be that in large companies (with a few rungs of
management), people think they need to sound impressive to be listened too.
Thus they try and make the idea sell-able. This dumb's it down and you get the
lowest-common-denominator stuff this article is talking about.

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alttab
I think it's called design by committee

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teaspoon
"Iteration-itis" suggests inflammation of the iteration. "Iterationorrhea"
would be more appropriate to what is described.

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ChristianMarks
Iteration-itis is also known as "change management" in academia, which boils
down to "before you change, you must consult." Academia and Information
Technology are particularly prone to this disease. A good take on change
management in academia is
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/22/university-a...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/feb/22/university-
administration-change-jonathan-wolff)

