Why prototyping can benefit any organisation

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection"
- Mark Twain

The word prototype has 17 synonyms. These include Mock-up, Model and Pre-cursor.

My favourite is Forerunner.

Often the people and businesses I work with are stuck.

They have been lured into the perfection trap, paralyzed because they have instantly tried to build the entire product all at once. Worried about what others might think. Blocked by an impending sense of pre-meditated failure. Worse still, they have built what the boardroom asked for.

There is another way, though.

Embrace the prototype. 

• Prototypes free us up by simplifying what we want to create. A scaled-back version can offer a flavour of what 'it' might be.
• They allow us to put our ideas before the very people we made ‘it’ for. Then, to listen and observe what they think.
• Suddenly we get to find out what can be better BEFORE we launch.

Good enough doesn’t mean poor quality, it represents another step towards quality.

Everything and anything can be a prototype. 

That book you have inside your head can start as a blog post. That app you want to build can be a sketch. 

Many of my successes in helping businesses evolve have come from gathering a small group of protagonists around a problem and making a prototype. Then, enlisting a larger group to test.

Similarly, putting the prototype in front of a small group of customers, improving based on feedback, and then involving a larger group of customers.

What will you make?

A key principle of my work is to teach people and businesses always to be launching. Let's talk if you fancy a chat about prototyping or need help getting you and your team unstuck.

Photo by Luis Quintero on Unsplash