The Latent Truths

I recently found myself re-reading two of Ellen Diresta's wonderful posts from 2008 on uncovering explicit and tacit motivations in the context of product and service innovation.

After attending Adaptive Paths' MX conference, I posted a framework for consumer research that defined three areas to Ellen's two.  I've updated the descriptions below.

• Explicit:  What someone is willing (and able) to tell us.
• Tacit:  What they can't say directly, but we can infer.
• Latent:  What could manifest in the future but is unavailable to them (unknowable.)

I highly recommend a read of Ellen's posts for uncovering the explicit and the tacit motivations driving consumer behavior/needs.  They are dead on.  But it strikes me once again that there is a soft line that potentially divides the Tacit into that which can be known or imagined (by the user) and that which is unknowable to them in their current state of mind and social existence (unimaginable.)

The realm of product/service/business disruption seems a fecund playground for latent motivations - behaviors, needs and desires that can't exist in the current environment and that require a world the user lacks the ability (or skills) to bring themselves to imagine or conceive.

I will play off of Ellen's example of the personal computer.  But rather than speak of innovations to the personal computer, I will speak of the shift from Mainframe to personal computers.  I believe it would have been very difficult to understand unmet future needs when speaking to mainframe adopters or laggards. The first forays from mainframe computing to personal computing would slowly disrupt and revolutionize the industry over a period of a few years. 

Most of us have read or heard of Ken Olsen's statement (then head of DEC), "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." This is a quotation taken out of context of that era's milieu.  What Ken appears to have been trying to convey was that there was no reason to have a computer that controlled your home, turned on and off your lights, managed your heating and even regulated your refrigerator and meals.

Yet this is exactly what computers are now doing in an ever increasing number of homes.  From home security systems to turning on your coffee pot and even "intelligent" refrigerators. In fact, personal computers even help manage our entertainment or media consumption (AppleTV and Window Media Center.)  I realize I've taken a bit of a leap from mainframes to embedded micro-controllers and the like, but not when you consider the exponentially increasing pace of technological change.

The speed of technological advancement and subsequent breakthroughs continues to increase and this is inversely impacting time to disruption.  When placed in the context of changes that occurred from the industrial and pre-industrial age, the timeframes can be quite stunning.  Today we see a number of relatively recent entrants already showing their ability to severely disrupt the incumbents.

• VOIP vs. Analog Telephony
• Open Source Movement vs. Proprietary Software
• High speed CMOS vs. Film

And here is where I believe that prototypes combined with structured play give us the opportunity to shift the Latent into the realm of the Tacit or even the Explicit. Even as the developers of a disruptive offering, we can't clearly see the disruption we are looking to bring to the table or predict it's implications or potential adoption.

Prototypes give a glimpse of something different but alone fall short of the social, emotional and environmental triggers that would create the paradigm shift required.  Play provides a structure within which suspension of disbelief can be engaged and environmental factors can be transferred to the participant via the "rules" of the game.

Combined these two forces can allow us to shortcut the significant defenses against imagining an alien reality.

“…the real value of a model or simulation may stem less from
its ability to test a hypothesis than from its power to generate
useful surprise.”, Michael Schrage, Serious Play (h/t portigal)

My experience tells me it is far more likely that we succeed in shifting latent needs and motivations into the realm of the tacit versus the explicit. Thus we should be careful of taking consumers at their "word." Ellen says it beautifully, "Since you're trying to create something that does not yet exist, you cannot take the consumers' suggestions at face value.  The translation between what they say and the criteria you need to develop for a successful new product may take several iterations."

Image Source: Bright Tal (Political)