The Wow Project

Karl Weick, the brilliant University of Michigan professor of organizational behavior and psychology, has his own system: His sport coat doubles as a filing cabinet. He fills the pockets with anything that he can make notes on -- scraps of paper, napkins, matchbook covers. Then, once a week, he empties out his tweed filing cabinet and records his observations.

If you're always observing, you're always learning -- and, in the process, you're collecting ideas, leads, starting points that you can turn into a Wow Project later on. Open your eyes, and you'll start seeing project material everywhere you look. What's more, recording what you see teaches you another critical project lesson: Little things do matter. For instance, design counts. When you're looking for passion to infuse your project with, design is where you'll find it. And passion can come in small touches: A flash of humor can change a completely mundane, easily overlooked communication into a personal expression of attention.

Or passion can materialize in the art of simplification -- such as taking a mindless form that unnecessarily forces office workers to decode gibberish and turning it into a simple set of statements and boxes to check off. Which is exactly what the folks at the Simplified Communications division of New York-based Siegel & Gale Inc. specialize in: They can take something as uninformative and confusing as a credit-card bill and turn it into an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand, customer-friendly communication that repositions the bank that sends it out as the kind of financial institution that actually delivers service! If you study the approach of Siegel & Gale -- or just look at street signs that actually direct you -- you'll learn one key lesson: The best kinds of design, like the best kinds of projects, don't call attention to themselves. They use small touches to demonstrate the sensibility and the sensitivity -- the authenticity -- of the people who have worked on them.

Step Four: Use superfast approximations to refine your Wow Project. 3M has built a company around a simple approach: Make a little, try a little, sell a little -- and then repeat those steps. The fastest, smartest way to get your project defined and refined is to practice the art of quick prototyping. Don't keep your project hidden in some private skunk works until you can hone it into a perfect deliverable. Instead, make a rough prototype, and show it to some team members. Listen to their feedback; then go back and make a second prototype. Show it to them again. You'll be doing two things at once: improving your project, and selling people on its value (after all, you've incorporated their input!). Make a little, try a little, sell a little -- that's how prototyping and selling overlap from the beginning of a Wow Project.

One Trap to Avoid: getting too much money too soon. That's the worst thing that can happen to a project. (Believe it.) Money will kill you on two counts. First, it takes the pressure off. Early in the life of every project, there's no substitute for the scrounging mentality. If you don't have enough money, you have to innovate your way around problems that you could otherwise simply buy your way out of. You have to work more closely with your users and your suppliers -- and, as a result, they become part of the project from the beginning. You have to adopt the pirate's mind-set: It's us against them! We're going to outthink, outhustle, outdream everybody -- because we sure don't have the money to outspend them. Second, if you take money early on, from internal or external sponsors, then early on you've got to listen to them. They just bought the right to sit at your table and to meddle in your life. And the last thing that a Wow Project needs is a money person setting the specifications for the project, deciding what's worth investing more time and money in, and draining the passion from the project. To avoid the problem, live poor and dream big.

Five Criteria for Judging Each Project: You can boil a project down to a simple list of five criteria: Wow! Beautiful! Revolutionary! Impact! Raving fans! (That last criteria comes courtesy of Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles's book "Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service" [William Morrow, 1993].) After all, this is the big enchilada. We all know what those five terms mean. (Right?) But we rarely -- make that, never -- use such language between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. It's time to change that. Write down those five terms on a card. Put the card in your wallet. When the time comes for you to judge whether a proposed project measures up -- or can be made to measure up -- simply dig the card out of your wallet. It either measures up, or it doesn't. You'll know.