Prototypes help us to align our mental models
I already mentioned that prototypes help us to develop a deeper and common understanding of our ideas. We also often talk about that prototypes will help us to âalign our mental modelsâ.
What do we actually mean by that?
Let me tell you a story: A couple of years ago, in the beginning of my career as a business design prototyper, we had a business design training with one of our customers. In the morning, our coaches trained three teams in Business Design. In the afternoon the teams put the theory into practice and started working on building real ideas.
Within one week we did everything we typically do in Business Design Sprints: Discover -> Design -> Validate -> Decide. The teams were set-up pretty diverse: High-flyer prospects from all over Europe with different skills, backgrounds and from different business units across the whole company.
On day four I came in, the teams pitched their ideas to me and I built prototypes for them within the next day. There was one team which pitched their idea to me like this:
We want to build a mobile app where people who share the same car (families, friendsâŠ) can share the documents related to this car (insurance/registration documents etc.) easily with each other.
I started prototyping and we did several feedback-sessions (iterations). Pretty late in the process, there was one team member who approached me like this:
Team member:
Could you add a big red button right on the main screen of the app?
Me:
Sure, what is this button for?
Team member:
This is for calling help in case of an emergency!
It turned out, that one part of the team wanted to build this document sharing app and two people of the team thought they were building some kind of emergency app. If you think about it, these are completely different business models with different job(s) to get done, target group(s), pains & gains etc.
Up to this point the team worked three full days within our tools (Business Model, Hypotheses & Experiments, Lean Offerings etc.). And yet, their mental models about what they are trying to build were pretty far apart.
After that, I questioned everything we did in our trainings-concept: Myself, our coaches, our tools, our process. But after that training, I had similar experiences in other trainings and projects. Only then did I realize that this is not a bug in our approach, this in an important task of prototyping:
Helping people to understand what others think: Helping them to align their mental models.
Prototyping can do something what words, tools and postits often canât do: Understand each other better and on a more granular level. And if you think about it, this is actually not very surprising: People in Business Design teams are usually very diverse (thatâs a good thing) and use different language & codes, have different cultural backgrounds, skills and use a tool to communicate their thoughts thatâs not very precise: words & sentences.
Thatâs one of the reasons you should prototype! Do it earlyâŠ.and often!