Paper (Plane) Prototyping

This is a necropost - resurrected from the now defunct blog of a previous employer. Sadly, all of the photos have fallen down the memory hole. So use your imagination.

One of our missions in The Lab is to introduce the ideas of prototyping and rapid innovation into the business. That's a fairly hefty systemic change for any company - so how do we go about doing it?

Paper aeroplanes.

Yup. Sheets of paper, crudely folded and then thrown are the perfect way to get people collaborating, innovating, testing, and refining. Let me explain…

We took a conference of ~250 people and split them in to teams of 8. Each were giving loads of coloured paper, drinking straws, string, tape, and instruction cards.

They had three tasks to complete (feel free to use these images if you want to run this event for your team - each links to a full size version)

• Jumping Through Hoops - throw a plane through a hoop as many times as possible in 30 seconds.

• Taken For A Ride - how far can you throw a plane while keeping a pilot safe?

• Round The Bend - how many times can you throw and catch a plane around a pole?

We gave each team a scorecard which allowed them 3 attempts at each task - and 60 minutes to score as many points as they could.

A Simple Start

The first planes which people built were, I think it's fair to say, crude. Vaguely remembered childhood skills were dredged up to make serviceable craft.

But, with testing, iteration, and "inspiration" from other teams, new planes began to take flight.

Some of the planes were of a less orthodox nature - yet still managed to complete the task set.

Engineering Complexity

Some were beautiful and baroque piece of engineering which took ages to build - yet fell short of their intended target, veered wildly off course, and nose dived. It's almost like it's a metaphor or something….

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YKP-OThqJi0

Team Work

Even the best designed and build planes still need a competent team working in tandem to deliver results.

Bending The Rules

In each task, teams came up with clever ways around the limitations of the rules.

We saw people using zip wires, stuffing multiple small planes within bigger planes, and - in one memorable case - using trebuchets.

Evolution

Everyone got into the spirit of the event - we saw people attempt a task with one sort of plane, see it fail, then rapidly design another plane, test it privately, and bring it back for another attempt - all within a few minutes.

Some teams started by saying "we don't know how to build a plane" and then realised that the only way you learn is by trying, failing, trying again.

We had teams who were convinced that their design was perfect - only to have to radically reassess what they were doing when faced with competition.

By the end of the hour, every team had build dozens of planes and had experienced the joy of rapid design and prototyping.

What no one did was ring up a big consultancy company, pay a million pounds, and then end up with a poorly performing plane which didn't meet any of the needs of the users. Funny that…

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Huge thanks to Jez and Nic for coming up with the paper plane concept, Joe and James for keeping score, and everyone else on The Lab team for helping out with the event. Special thanks to Brendan O'Rourke for letting us experiment at his conference :-)