A Service Design Principle to avoid reinventing the wheel at work.

You get a new job to do at work. You are all excited and start generating a few fresh ideas. Then, once you present them to a wider team, people tell you:

"Hmmm, that's pretty similar to what we already tried 10 years ago..."

What? Of course, the person who briefed you didn't know about this old thing, and therefore you didn't know too. All your work feels like having been done for nothing.

But the good news is that this is something that can easily be avoided.

When starting a project, it can be smart to ask someone who is the “museum of the organization” what they know about similar ideas that have been done in the past. This can help you understand how this “new” idea might fail based on past experiences of similar ideas. And it can help you build on the work that has been done in the past instead of starting fresh because you didn't know about it.

Action question

Who are the museum people in your organisation that know all about the past experiments? How can you involve these people more in your projects to benefit from the learnings of the past?

Daniele's note

This is a first draft of a principle that might end up in a book of the "Service Design Principles" series.