Kathy Sierra: Dilbert and the Zone of Mediocrity

I first heard about Kathy Sierra in a post on David Hansson’s Loud Thinking blog. Kathy also attended RailsConf Europe in September. She and a few friends write at Creating Passionate Users. She’s deeply interested in the brain, artificial intelligence, psychology, and philosophy. Her articles offer a different perspective on things we should already know. This post is an excellent example. Here’s the translation:

Dilbert and the Zone of Mediocrity

Caption. [title] “How your users feel about your product or service”.
[arrows] “here is good”, “here you’re screwed”, “here is good”.
[bar] “Love”, “Zone of Mediocrity”, “Hate”.

How courageous are you? How far would you (or your employer) go to avoid the Zone of Mediocrity? Unless you’re willing to risk Passionate Hatred, you may never get to feel Love. Scott Adams agrees. In a recent post on the Dilbert blog, he said “if everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will never be a success … The reason a product that ’everyone likes’ will fail is because nobody ’loves’ it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of consumers have it”.

This is NOT about being remarkable — it’s about being lovable. And that almost always means being hated too. Our book “Head First Java”, for example, has 139 reviews on Amazon, and the vast majority are either five stars (“love this, the best tech book ever made, I learned so much from it”) or one star (“hate this, the worst tech book I’ve ever seen, the authors should be shot”). But making a book that people would love or hate was never our intention. We decided to make a book in a friendlier, easier-to-learn format — we had no idea how naive we were about how many implicit “rules” we were breaking. It was only when O’Reilly editors started a mini-revolt that we realized we’d crossed a Line That Cannot Be Crossed and created something potentially embarrassing.

Today, it’s far more risky to create something “safe” than to risk something deeply provocative, dangerously innovative, or just plain weird.

Think about all the things you love today that once seemed very, very strange. Things where someone took a big risk.

Today, the more you try to prevent failure, the more likely you are to fail

This wasn’t always true, but come on… how many more [anything] do we really need today? There are plenty of the things we already have and not many presentations of things we don’t have. We all know the reasons companies play it safe, and why employees are often forced to play it safe — but it’s not helping anyone.

What does it take to escape the Zone of Mediocrity?

Normally, at this point, I’d talk about the things everyone talks about… how to come up with revolutionary ideas, where to look for opportunities, how to be innovative, blah blah blah. You already know all of that. I think it boils down to this:

To avoid the Zone of Mediocrity, you must suspend disbelief

You must want to and be able to switch off (temporarily) The Inner Voice that says, “We’ll never be able to pull this off. People are going to hate this.” That doesn’t necessarily mean The Voice is wrong, but until you can silence it, you’re virtually guaranteed to stay with safe, incremental ideas. But remember — “safe” is not safer anymore, unless your goal is to avoid criticism. Playing it safe will keep you safely out of the spotlight. If that’s what you want (and sometimes that’s the right call), then great. But if it’s not…

(note: this is similar to The Inner Game or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or any other creativity technique that gets the logical, “talking” part out of the way so the more useful, silent parts of your brain can get on with the important things you’re trying to accomplish).

And it’s not just about suspending disbelief about what your users (or critics) will say… you must suspend disbelief about what your company will let you do. I first experienced this at Sun, where it was nearly impossible to brainstorm creative ways to improve things without someone jumping in with “Yeah, but they’ll never let us do that.” End of discussion. End of the chance to do something amazing. Every time I run an internal workshop, the participants are far more negative than when some of those same people are in a public version of the same workshop. Taking them out of their companies and having them think, reason, or work on fictional projects or other people’s projects — their minds are free to move. I’ve almost given up on running internal workshops because the “they’ll never let us do that” syndrome is so strong.

You can’t help users grow until your employer lets you grow. Easy for an unemployed person like ME to say ;)