After you get through the complexity understanding the customer, you then need to stop designing products, and start designing solutions. Those solutions must create experiences. To do this you first have to determine what people want to accomplish. How does the experience fit into their lives and how can you deliver on their desires. By asking these kinds of questions you take your focus away from developing one-off types of products and instead develop complete systems that create the user experience.
When you are able to accomplish these things you will then be prepared to tackle an uncertain world where certainty is unknown, and complex problems do not have simple answers. In working in a world that is subject to change without notice, success requires constant improvement, involvement, and you have to be ready to change.
Subject To Change is one of those books that mark the end of an era of thinking, and challenges companies to rethink their role in the market place. Intelligently written, incredibly easy to understand, and making a lot of sense, it actually puts to word a lot of what I have been seeing in the business world over the last five years. For example, old thinking allowed Sony to create the Walkman which was a very successful product. New thinking allowed Apple to create the iPod which is successful not because of a product, but because of an experience. The experience begins with the iPod, but continues through the managing of your music with iTunes, and buying of your music from the iTunes Music Store. That is what creating an experience is about. That is what Subject To Change is about.
The principles that are outlined in Subject To Change lay down a clear path for the future, and for companies willing to travel down this new highway the rewards will be great. I highly recommend Subject To Change as a road map to the future.
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