The Double Loop
designabetterbusiness.com
(Thanks for reading, I’ve recently made a better version of this article here)
The process of creating a new business can feel confusing.
Unlike other recipes, results aren’t guaranteed: you can follow in the footsteps of other entrepreneurs and still fail, you can try something totally innovative and strike gold.
Twenty people can start working on the same rough idea, but on average only two of them will build businesses that around in five years’ time.
Some entrepreneurs put this down to luck, but that’s probably too simplistic of an explanation.
Instead, they are going through a non-linear process – just because you started first doesn’t mean you’ll scale your business the fastest.
By understanding the process as a whole, and each step in detail, you can keep yourself oriented throughout the journey.
By naming each stage and understanding its purpose, you can stay focused and inspired, even when your customers reject your prototypes.
I was introduced to the world of Design Thinking back in 2013, and since then have seen about 20 different models that try to describe the process.
Here’s one of the more famous ones:
careerfoundry.com
These five stages are a great summary of what’s involved in design thinking, but I must admit my eyes find it tough to follow all of those lines.
Rather than nitpicking over details, let’s instead focus on what these models have in common, and then take a look at one of the most elegant models – The Double Loop.
What Everyone Agrees On
Generally speaking, designers will all talk about three main stages of work:
1. Understanding a person and the issues they face today.
2. Creating lots of ideas for potential solutions.
3. Building simple versions of the solutions that can be tested and studied.
These stages are often drawn as loops, because you’re often making progress in a way that feels at first like you’re going backwards, but eventually puts you back on course.
I like this illustration:
nextleapdesign.com
What this image doesn’t quite show is that most of the time your first idea has a few issues.
At the conclusion of the test, you’re nowhere near ready to scale, in fact you need to go back to the first and second stages again.
However, this is not the same as going “back to square one”, because now we’re much more knowledgable following our tests and experiments.
We’re likely to come up with new ideas, better prototypes and faster results, which will teach us even more.
Like your driver’s test, a failed run teaches you important lessons, and you’ll be determined to never make those same mistakes again.
You get to make a whole new set of mistakes next time, and this will continue until you can prove that you’re worthy of being out on the road.
The Double Loop
I really like The Double Loop, popularised by Patrick van der Pijl and the book Design A Better Business.
designabetterbusiness.com
There are five things that resonate with me:
1. The top loop is the “head in the clouds” stage, where we ask questions and dream up new ideas – an amazing time for innovative thinking.
2. The bottom loop is the “feet in the dirt” stage, where ideas meet reality and we see what actually works – an amazing time for learning.
3. After validation, we update our Point of View and then understand the problem in greater detail, allowing us to create even better ideas.
4. The loops don’t feel like linear progress, but they constantly improve our Point of View.
5. The cycle continues until we find an opportunity that can scale – it has to be earned through trial and error.
Strategyzer came out with their own version of this model in the book Testing Business Ideas, adding a few more descriptors:
strategyzer.com
I like the details they’ve added, like the Business Prototype page in the top loop and the Hypothesize stage in the bottom loop, which are essential parts of the process.
That said, for some reason this diagram seems to be much harder for the reader to comprehend, but I do love the diagram at the bottom.
What Some Find Hard To Swallow
The catch with any explanation of the iterative process is that it offers no guarantees.
When it comes to selling services in other parts of the business world, you can generally get what you pay for.
Pay more for machinery = increased capacity and reliability.
Pay more for a sales team = increased revenues and market share.
Pay more for a videographer = better marketing materials.
I’ve worked with clients who expect money-back guarantees when designing prototypes.
Literally, they’ve said “if the tests don’t look positive, will we get our money back?”.
Part of me wants to laugh at them, but I get that we’re trained to think that way.
If I spent a lot of money on a new IT setup and two months later my supplier said “what a shame, turns out it doesn’t work”, I’d be upset too.
The fact is, innovation is less like IT and more like dating.
Imagine signing up for a dating service with the condition that you must marry the first person you meet.
The aim of a dating service isn’t to be efficient, it’s to find great people you otherwise might not have met.
You first have to learn about yourself and your preferences, scan lots of possibilities, try some low-risk experiments, and double down when you find something promising.
And much like a dating service, it can help if you have a few trusted friends nudging you along the way, so that you don’t quit out of fear or propose on your first date.
What To Do In The Top Loop
The top loop is all about insight, about the world today, the lives of your customers, and the business models of the future.
It can help to start with The Problem Tree, to better understand why things are the way they are.
We can understand our customers with the Value Proposition Canvas, digging into their needs and wants.
We can also draft a Business Model Canvas, to get a sense of how a sustainable company might be possible.
Finally, we can prepare for our Customer Interviews, ensuring that we don’t let courtesy distract us from the truth.
What To Do In The Bottom Loop
The bottom loop is about reality, what people actually care about, and what we can actually deliver.
We can start with Test Cards, to clarify our assumptions, how we’ll verify them and how we’ll know if we’re right.
We can then build a Minimum Viable Product, the right amount of scrappy to teach us about our customers and their behaviours.
We can run a short trial with existing products and services, letting the market show us how interested they are.
Finally, we can go back to our Business Model Canvas, and reassess which parts of the model are true and which need adjustment.
designthinking.ideo.com
How Do I Know When I Can Proceed?
The first sign will be obvious – when you have customers asking you for more.
If you’re genuinely scratching an itch for a decent number of people, they’ll let you know about it.
A good question here is “If we stopped this business, who would be upset?”.
If you have a sizeable list, you’re ready to talk about scale and growth.
If you struggle to think of many people outside of friends and family, you’re still in The Double Loop.
But the bigger picture takes a little longer to comprehend – it requires you to be confident in the Three Lenses; Desirability, Feasibility and Viability.
Your model must be all three.
It must be desirable to customers, hence the queue out the door.
It must be feasible for your team to run, or you can’t scale.
It must be financially viable, able to survive a downturn and not dependent on ongoing donors.
I really like The Double Loop, and I hope it helps you too.
Some days it will feel like an annoying reminder that progress sometimes feels like you’re going backwards.
But it also reminds us that we’re on the right track, that good ideas survive testing, and that we’ll keep going until we find one that works.
