How Iteration-itis Kills Good Ideas

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

I think it's called design by committee

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

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...